Carbon targets impossible without post occupancy overhaul

Roderic Bun, BSRIA information manager has told MPs that government targets for carbon emissions will not be met if post occupancy service levels in buildings are not improved.

In a speech to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Building Engineering on June 30, Bunn said buildings project teams were not being given enough chance to return to buildings once they were occupied, and proposed adopting a new framework for handover to occupants, called Soft Landings.

“In the March budget statement, the Government pledged that every new non-domestic building must be zero-carbon from 2019, with public-sector buildings required to be zero-carbon by 2018,” he said. “All new homes and schools will be zero carbon from 2016. That’s just eight years away.”

The ambitious targets would be impossible without an overhaul in the way buildings are handed over to occupants.

“Construction professionals are rarely commissioned to follow-through afterwards, to pass on knowledge to the occupiers and management, and to learn from the experience themselves. Consequently, we don’t really understand what we’re delivering; we don’t understand what works, and we don’t know what needs to be improved. So we’re not delivering the best value in the buildings we create.

There’s uncomfortable credibility gap between design aspiration, and reality. But we can’t kid our way to a low carbon future

“There’s uncomfortable credibility gap between design aspiration, and reality. But we can’t kid our way to a low carbon future. We’ve got to deliver, and that means we have to get real. And we’ve got to be able prove it.”

The Soft Landings framework, designed to run for as long as three years following occupancy, would allow project teams to work with new occupants to iron out glitches with building controls and make sure commitments to carbon targets were met.

The framework, “seeks to enable a closer match between the expectations of the client and the building users, and the predictions and aspirations of the project team,” said Bunn.

“To achieve this, designers and constructors need to have a greater involvement after handover. They need to be there to hand-hold the users during the difficult period after occupation, and to stay involved up to three years thereafter, providing the kind of support, trouble-shooting and fine-tuning services that only a professional team can provide.