Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR MICHAEL
BUCHANAN, MR
DAVID LLOYD
JONES, MS
ANGELA RAWSON,
MS JANET
NEWTON AND
MR ALLAN
JARVIS
24 MAY 2006
Q40 Paul Holmes: But if you have,
say, four schools that all, on your careful planning, seem sustainable
over 20-odd years but three of them flourish and prosper and expand
and one of them, for whatever reason, does not, what happens if
in 10 years the fourth one has to close because some of the pupils
have moved to the other three?
Ms Newton: If we get into that
Armageddon situation, which hopefully we will not—
Q41 Paul Holmes: That is what the
Education Bill is all about, surely?
Ms Newton: I think there are different
aspects of the Education Bill in terms of the White Paper where,
as an authority, we do not yet have clarity over some of the implications
around the ownership, the trust status, and, obviously, it is
an emerging Bill with emerging consequences. We have had to work
to the information that was available at the time and satisfy
ourselves that we had a robust case.
Q42 Chairman: I am conscious of you
stealing David's questions. Angela, do you want to come back on
that one?
Ms Rawson: Yes. I think one of
the key aspects as well is that we have lived for a number of
years with the, "This is the popular school and this is not."
The whole raison d'être for our vision for education
in this part of East Lancashire is now about collaboration, and,
as I said, it is that notion of there being one school. The head
teachers have actually got a protocol for working together, we
have got joint Chairs of the School Governing Bodies Forum that
meets twice a term, we have got joint staffing committees. We
are putting in the structures now, which are not just, "Yes,
we talk about collaboration because we need to do a joint bid
that gets us some money and then we will all go away and pretend
it never happened." We are actually tying systems, structures,
ways of working that are actually sealing that notion of collaboration,
and we have left some documentation for you, an A4 illustration,
about what that collaboration is about, and it is reflecting,
yes, the uniqueness and diversity of each school, because you
need that anyway, but also the underpinning feel that this is
about a whole one-town approach and the sharing of responsibility
for all the youngsters. Yes, opportunities might come up, and
we will have to look at how over time that partnership is tested,
but at the moment there is not anybody who is saying this is a
road we think we would go down.
Q43 Mr Chaytor: Chairman, I think
we have touched on the social dimension and the economics; I really
want to come back to the environmental dimension now and ask David
about environmental standards. Your practice is responsible for
the first zero-emission building, I understand. What are the prospects
for zero-emission school buildings and what is your feeling about
the BREEAM standards that new school buildings are expected to
aspire to?
Mr Lloyd Jones: Taking the latter
part of your question, the BREEAM standards that schools are expected
to comply with are not radical in any way. They are standards
that can be relatively easily achieved without any major financial
outlay. They are more to do with assessing the situation, looking
at the various measures that are available to you in terms of
designing the building in an energy-efficient and environmentally
conscious way, and that might involve a whole range of things
depending on where the building is located, how it is oriented,
how many storeys it is and a whole range of things like that.
What we do as a practice is sit down with all stakeholders right
at the outset and we have a matrix and we go through all the issues,
including transport (how you get to the school, and so on), and,
against that, there are various benchmarks so that you can set
at an early stage what you are actually trying to achieve by the
time you have reached the end of the project in terms of output,
in terms of a quantifiable result, and against that you can put
a cost. Obviously, the more you do this, the more accurately you
can do it. It is just a question of deciding how far you want
to be innovated, for example, how far you want to do best practice,
how far you want to fulfil the BREEAM guidelines and then go for
it. There is absolutely no reason why any school should not achieve
excellence in terms of BREEAM standards.
Q44 Mr Chaytor: But excellence is
not zero emissions?
Mr Lloyd Jones: It is not zero
emissions. If one was to go for zero emissions, that is a different
ball park really. You would have to think very seriously of integrating
renewable energy into the building, and so you are looking at
photovoltaics, or wind turbines, or other forms of generating
electricity on site or locally, it does not necessarily have to
be on site, but with a dedicated supply. It is only then that
you can achieve zero emissions.
Mr Jarvis: One of the things we
are a little disappointed about in Bradford is that we are learning
from our preferred bidder that the photovoltaics and the wind
turbines that were specified for our new schools are not actually
going to be very cost-effective, and, because money often drives
these things, we are not getting as much renewability and sustainability
in our Bradford schools as we had hoped for. We are having wind
turbines and photovoltaics in all the schools in different mixes
to where they are in the city and what the environmental concerns
are, but it is very disappointing to find that, for example, the
absolute maximum energy contribution in the best of the three
schools is only 15% of the total consumption. I think, if we want
to address environmental and sustainability issues in terms of
making net carbon emissions, being a net zero drawer on the National
Grid for electricity, and so on and so forth, then we are going
to have to spend some money to achieve that over and beyond what
is necessary simply to design and build the school.
Q45 Mr Chaytor: You are talking about
generation of energy. What about the reduction of energy and demand
management within the school? Is not part of the design brief
that the consumption of energy can be reduced, indeed, can be
far cheaper than actually installing renewable energy regeneration?
Mr Lloyd Jones: You can design
a school to the best standards in terms of environmental performance
as you can, but once you have handed over the school, the school
has got to be run in accordance with the objectives of that particular
route, and it is part of our job to make that as easy as possible,
to make it as intuitive as possible, but you do need a period
at the end of the project—we talked a lot about the beginning,
but the end is also absolutely vital—to get on board a building
manager and the various people who are going to run the building,
make sure that they are conversant with the processes, make sure
that lights are not left on the whole time and institute procedures,
and so on. It is only then, and that is why this monitoring is
so important, can you judge how well the building is performing,
but there is no reason why schools could not do it in the same
way as any other building.
Mr Chaytor: Is the guidance from the
Department sufficiently specific in terms of the environmental
sustainability aspects or not? What does the guidance say about
the environmental performance of buildings under BSF? Does it
specify particular BREEAM levels? I do not know what this guidance
says.
Q46 Chairman: You are nodding, Angela.
Ms Rawson: Yes, that has been
part of the output specifications that we developed and which
the bidders bid back to us on.
Q47 Mr Chaytor: What does it say?
Ms Newton: As a minimum we have
to achieve a very good BREEAM rating.
Q48 Mr Chaytor: The minimum is BREEAM
very good, but BREEAM very good is not very demanding, is it?
Anybody can still stick a bit of polystyrene between their cavity
walls and achieve BREEAM very good, can they not?
Ms Newton: No, we would seek to
achieve more than BREEAM very good, but the schools are funded
by PFI. Clearly it is output-led rather than input-led. So, as
part of the output, the minimum achievement is a BREEAM very good.
Q49 Mr Chaytor: But it is not output-led
in terms of net emissions over the 25-year period whether or not
at that scale of specificity?
Ms Newton: It is not. It is very
much at the local discretion in terms of the emissions that can
be achieved.
Q50 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the planning
process, what were the key factors in Lancashire and Bradford
that drove the designs you adopted and the programme that you
developed?
Mr Jarvis: Could you repeat the
question?
Q51 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the whole
planning process, what are the key factors in terms of sustainability
that you established in developing your BSF programme?
Mr Jarvis: I was not personally
involved in what the council decided to write, I was only involved
at the school level, but we did have a discretion at school level
to decide whether we thought the council should be asking for
a very good BREEAM rating or an excellent BREEAM rating, and we
decided that we wanted it to be an excellent BREEAM rating, and
we decided that there needed to be a very clear link between what
the buildings did, in terms of their performance, in terms of
sustainability, and the evidence that the children themselves
could see of that, and so there was a link into the curriculum.
One of the key inputs that we asked for from the schools in developing
the output specification was that there should be, for example,
grey water use in schools for the flushing of lavatories and urinals
and that there should be some metering in the school to demonstrate
to the students that grey water was being used in this way, so
that we were educating the students in their buildings about the
way in which their buildings were delivering and, indeed, failing
to deliver on sustainability issues.
Q52 Mr Chaytor: There is no Smart
Metering for energy consumption, for example?
Mr Jarvis: Yes. Let me cite the
case of Tong School. They are one of the three in Phase 1 in Bradford
which is expected to have a wind turbine. That will have a wind
turbine and a meter in one of the principal circulation areas
inside the school. It will show what contribution that wind turbine
is making at any given moment to the total energy being consumed
by the school.
Q53 Mr Chaytor: The question is:
if this can be done in one school in one local authority without
enormous excess cost, why should it not be standard practice in
all schools?
Mr Jarvis: I would like to see
it become standard practice in all schools certainly.
Q54 Mr Chaytor: Bradford itself has
not specified that all schools should have this kind of approach.
Mr Jarvis: No, it was left to
the individual school. We did specify it slightly differently
from school to school. At the school that I am connected with,
Buttershaw, we opted for photovoltaics, but, again, we asked that
these should be metered in such a way that the children walking
past could see what at any given point in time the contribution
those photovoltaics were making to the school's energy consumption,
and so on and so forth. There are other examples that we asked
for, but they are probably less expressive in terms of what the
children can see and learn directly, but we asked that the sustainability
issues addressed through the output specification be ones from
which the children themselves can learn. We take the view, I do
not know whether Janet feels the same, that the next generation
will be the ones who really have to combat these issues and will
really be in a position to make policy on this. At the moment,
as I think I said in my introductory remarks at very beginning,
we are finding that our contractor, our construction company,
is reluctant to drive through some of the outcomes we would like
to see through sustainability because they are costly.
Q55 Mr Chaytor: In terms of future
proofing and flexibility of the design, how important is it to
allow for the future internal rearrangements of the building or
adaptation to new technical possibilities in the future?
Mr Jarvis: Absolutely vital. The
solution that our architects have adopted, even though they have
met the challenging outputs required from Building Bulletin 93
in terms of acoustic performance, have provided us with walls
that can be demounted or repositioned, they have adopted a grid
and they have adopted a strategy for the mechanical and electrical
fit-out of the buildings that means that there are very few service
ducts, the service ducts have been very sensitively sited so that
they are unlikely to obstruct future adaptation, the various teaching
wings in the block have been designed so that they can be added
to or extended linearly to create additional accommodation if
it is required. All those issues have been addressed through the
design and were specified in the output specification.
Q56 Chairman: Michael, how do you
measure up? You are in this business. You are here because your
place is good; you have good credentials in the environmental
sector. What if I nipped round to your place and checked on your
carbon footprint? Would you know what it was as a company?
Mr Buchanan: What, our office's?
Q57 Chairman: Yes.
Mr Buchanan: No, I would not know
that.
Q58 Chairman: Why not?
Mr Buchanan: Because we operate
out of other people's offices in practice and it is not something
that we have modelled as a company.
Q59 Chairman: Could you not do that?
In terms of a good supply chain these guys ought to be asking
you, "We are asking you to design a school with a low footprint.
Is it not about time you put your house in order and measured
what your footprint on this planet is"?
Mr Buchanan: Yes, that is a very
good observation. We try to model the practice that we are encouraging
in all sorts of other ways, but you are quite right in observing
not in that particular way.
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