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The cost of BREEAM in schools

Sean Lockie, director of sustainability for Atkins' subsidiary Faithful+Gould, discusses the value of the BREEAM sustainability rating system for school buildings and refurbishment in the UK. 

The industry got worried in January when a rumour spread that the Government was looking into testing the value of BREEAM (an environmental rating method) in school refurbishment / new building on “value for money” grounds.  Would compulsory BREEAM standards on education projects be the next to be scrapped?

BREEAM is a rating system used to independently assess the performance of a project in the areas of health, energy, transport, water, materials, waste, land-use, ecology and pollution. It’s not a perfect system or a design tool but if it were scrapped what would replace it to ensure the sustainability outcomes of education were rigorously measured?

Part of the debate will no doubt be centred on whether BREEAM adds costs and administrative burden to the construction industry.  On the cost front, I was personally involved in a 2008 study which undertook research with the BRE Trust to establish the costs of complying with BREEAM in schools. The research concluded that, depending on the location, a primary school might cost between 1.8–3.0% extra for complying with a BREEAM ‘Very Good’ rating and 5.9–9.85% for ‘Excellent’. Similarly a secondary school might cost between 0.8–2.7% for ‘Very good’ and 3.9–4.4% for ‘Excellent’. Location had an impact on the score with schools built on brownfield sites and near good transport links having the advantage of getting several ‘free’ points under BREEAM. Rural schools and ones built on greenfield sites have to work harder to get the same score and therefore usually cost more. Economies of scale also had an impact on the overall costing.

The research was used to help inform the former DCFS (Department for Children, Schools and Families) funding models for programmes such as Building Schools for the Future. But are these costs still relevant?

Several factors have reduced the ‘on-cost’ since the study. Two big factors have been changes to the Building Regulations, with the latest versions of Part L reducing carbon emissions and planning requirements often driving renewable solutions. A third is that in the four years since the study the industry has geared up to comply with BREEAM with the ‘Very Good’ standard becoming the norm and compliance not presenting much of a challenge to the industry. This means that if you are in education you need to understand and comply with BREEAM. Designers and contractors working in schools have become very astute at being able to focus their efforts on getting the best BREEAM scores and several contactors have developed standard school designs which are ‘BREEAM compliant’.   

A few tips on getting a cost neutral BREEAM ‘Very Good’ score:

Starting early. Selecting the design team and contractor based not only on their ‘time cost quality’ credentials but also on their ability to get high BREEAM scores.

A targeted approach. BREEAM awards points for complying with certain actions. Most have sorted the points so they target the no / low cost points first in order to achieve the best score for the lowest price.    

Tracking progress. Being a BREEAM assessor can have its frustrations as it can feel like you are constantly chasing individuals in the team to provide the supporting evidence. BREEAM tracker tools have emerged which name the poor performers in the project teams who haven’t provided the required evidence.

There are of course benefits to having buildings which have been independently assessed under a scheme like BREEAM. These might include lower running costs, higher levels of productivity or achievement levels and, in the case of commercial buildings, potentially higher valuations and rentals. 

Whilst not perfect, BREEAM has done much to improve the sustainable performance of school projects and the industry has moved on in recent years.  Most of the new school design guidance will pick up many of the sustainability issues from BREEAM and deliver very efficient schools. However one recommendation we might make back to Government is the need for further development of school design guidance, producing more concise and centralised control of the design and delivery of projects. Focusing effort on identifying standard solutions to many school design elements will help reduce the tendency to reinvent the wheel and reduce cost, thereby reducing design time and providing more consistent elements across the school building stock. Government should therefore keep BREEAM because it is established, it raises standards, and most can deliver buildings to ‘Very Good’ standard for no additional on-cost.

This article was originally published in Building magazine, January 2012.