Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 700-719)

MS SALLY BROOKS, MR MARTIN LIPSON AND MR TIM BYLES

6 DECEMBER 2006

  Q700  Mr Chaytor: The Committee's impression from previous evidence is that waves 1, 2 and 3 were pushed forward pretty quickly and the priority given to the whole range of sustainability issues was not as high as it could have been. Is there some evaluation of the sustainability impacts in the first three waves? Or will there be an evaluation when these schools are up and running in terms of the carbon footprint, the changing travel patterns or biodiversity? That is not a point that has been raised at all. Are there plans to formally evaluate the impact of the first three waves of schools?

  Ms Brooks: Yes, we have plans to formally evaluate almost everything about the early waves of BSF. We are currently looking at how we evaluate the energy use and the carbon footprint. Whether we evaluate that whole sustainability thing is really dependent on a lot of things but we do need as a priority to look at how we can deliver a reduction in carbon emissions and the cost of that—and not just the cost but how it works. If you look at the book we have just published on sustainable schools, one of the things that appears to happen when you design a sustainable school with low energy use is that, in the first two or three years, the energy use seems to be extremely high compared with what we expect it to be.

  Q701  Chairman: Why?

  Ms Brooks: We are looking into that now. We are learning by our mistakes. We had the most sustainable school, trying to go for the lowest possible energy use; everybody said it was an example of best practice. It has opened, and the energy use is much higher than was expected. The architects are in there, the BRE are doing an evaluation, they are all doing evaluations of why this is happening. It is coming down, but, again, it is a case of learning by doing. Nobody could have predicted that was going to happen. They are now trying to find out why it is going to happen, to make sure it does not happen again.

  Chairman: Perhaps you could consult with the Blue School down in Wells. We went there and they energised the students to bring down their energy use very successfully.

  Q702  Mr Chaytor: That seems astonishing. This is now in a document.

  Ms Brooks: This is in the sustainability green book which we just published. We have taken case studies. I do not know the details of what is happening there but I think it is tremendously good that the architect and the school and the local authority who did this have acknowledged there is a problem and have said, "We are going to go and look at exactly why this is not working. We are going to drill down into the detail and we are going to make it work and then we are going to spread that good practice so that nobody else gets it." They have not got it completely wrong but it has to be worked in. We cannot just say we designed these schools in BSF waves 1, 2 and 3 to be low carbon without evaluating whether that is happening. Absolutely, we would have to do that, and we would have to use that information to feed into our expectations for future schools built—and not just through BSF but all the new schools we build—because we will be expecting higher standards in terms of carbon usage and we need to know how it works.

  Q703  Mr Chaytor: In future waves, beyond wave 3, you have now specified that there should be an architectural champion involved in the partnership. Is that right?

  Ms Brooks: No, we have always had a design champion.

  Q704  Mr Chaytor: So there is no change?

  Ms Brooks: There is a change in how we are evaluating design, yes. One of the issues that has come up—and, again, it is how we learn from doing—is that often at the end of the outline design period when a preferred bidder is chosen, when we looked at the designs of that preferred bidder they were not always as good as we would like them to be. We were using CABE to do that looking at. We realised that that is too late. There is no point saying at that point, "The designs aren't very good," so we are now working with CABE. We have not quite got there yet, but we hope to announce next month a new way of evaluating design to the short-listed bidders, where CABE is involved right from the beginning; looks at, in week 1, if you like, the early outline designs; reports back both to the local authority and to PfS and to DfES on what they consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of those short-listed designers; and, most importantly, talks to the designers about what they consider to be their strengths and weaknesses early on, to give those designers a chance to improve, so that, by the end of that design period, when the preferred bidder is appointed, they have already had to demonstrate that they are good at design.

  Q705  Mr Chaytor: In terms of guidelines over the range of sustainability issues, what has been the impact of the action plan on sustainable procurement? This was not in place for the further wave 1 schools, but it is now in place, I understand. Is that starting to have an impact or not? Or is that irrelevant to the whole issue?

  Ms Brooks: I am afraid we do not know the answer to that, so we will have to come back to you on that one.

  Mr Lipson: Are you thinking of the OGC guidance?

  Q706  Mr Chaytor: Presumably, yes.

  Mr Lipson: I am not sure of the answer.

  Mr Chaytor: Obviously it has not had an impact. It exists but it has not had an impact.

  Q707  Chairman: Would you write to the Committee on that.

  Ms Brooks: Yes, we will.[7] Perhaps I could correct something I said earlier, because I do not want to mislead you, on the issue about freedom of schools to borrow. Apparently schools are legally able to borrow but the Department limits the circumstances, but we do not allow them, for example, to mortgage their buildings because of the risk of that. In practice, therefore, very few schools do borrow but they are able to.


  Q708 Mr Marsden: I would like to press you on the environmental considerations and how you validate them. BREEAM on previous occasions has been used as a bit of a mantra for that. I do not want to carp but I do want to ask you very specifically about some of the criticisms we have had. We had one consultant before the Committee from Arup who was very vividly sceptical about BREEAM. Other people have said that it is possible to score highly on one indicator, like a brown-field site, and the others get neglected. Are you reviewing the efficacy of BREEAM?

  Ms Brooks: Yes. BREEAM balances out, as I am sure you have been told. It has eight areas that it covers and you have to have a certain score. You can have a high score in some areas and a low score in other areas and still meet BREEAM "very good". You can score very highly in every other area and not that highly in terms of your carbon use and still get BREEAM "very good". It is not easy to do but it is possible. BREEAM "very good" is very good.

  Q709  Mr Marsden: I have to say that the gentleman from Arup who came before us said that "very good" in his view meant just about passable.

  Ms Brooks: I am sorry, the BREEAM approach—

  Q710  Mr Marsden: You used the words "very good".

  Ms Brooks: Yes, I should not have used the words "very good". BREEAM is a good approach to an overall evaluation of sustainability across the piece. It is about the level at which you set it. We set it at something like 65% is very good and 75% is excellent. You can ratchet that up to 80% or 90%.

  Q711  Mr Marsden: You are saying, basically, that you think the goalposts need to be lifted a bit.

  Ms Brooks: But you can lift the goalposts across BREEAM and it still will not necessarily get you carbon neutral or low carbon scores. We will set up something separate which is just about carbon use, which says, "This is a stand-alone expectation that carbon reduction of x%" or "Within BREEAM the carbon bit is mandatory and you cannot offset the carbon against the others." I think we are looking at mandatory expectations around reductions in carbon emissions.

  Mr Byles: I think BREEAM is a very helpful starting point but you do have to look at an assessment in the context of a particular site you are talking about. It would be a very difficult world if you had no objective measure to set, but, as Sally has said, the characteristics of a site can influence very significantly the scoring that can be achieved.

  Q712  Mr Marsden: Sally, you say you are doing a review. How quickly will you come up with conclusions from that review? How quickly will they be incorporated into the next wave?

  Ms Brooks: We are looking at the moment at technically the ability to reach certain reductions in carbon emissions and the costs of that; that is, how much does it cost to get your 40/50/60/70/80% reduction? It is quite a complicated thing.

  Q713  Mr Marsden: That sounds to me like you are saying we are not going to get a revision of BREEAM any time soon but you are saying you are not happy with it at the moment.

  Ms Brooks: We do not need to do a revision of BREEAM in order to change our expectations on carbon reductions.

  Q714  Mr Marsden: When I asked you earlier, you said you were not happy with BREEAM. I asked, "Are you proposing to revise it?" and you said yes. You are now saying that you are not.

  Ms Brooks: No, I am not saying I am not. I am saying that we can revise BREEAM; it may take quite a while to do that; we do not need to wait for that revision in order to say, if ministers so choose, that we want to reduce carbon emissions.

  Mr Marsden: I think it would be really helpful if you could come back to the Committee with some written details on progress on that.[8]


  Q715 Chairman: Is BREEAM not becoming a bit of a fig leaf, though?

  Ms Brooks: Yes.

  Q716  Chairman: We are talking about sustainable schools. I was involved in discussing a new Academy in Peterborough. The building of the new Academy, which I think everyone locally celebrates—I think it is a science and engineering Academy—is going to do the most awful things in terms of the transportation of people in Peterborough. If there is not a transport plan built into any new development like this, it is a disaster for sustainability. How far do those broader aspects of sustainability come in when anyone is looking at the sustainability of a school?

  Ms Brooks: We have sustainability model which has what we call eight doorways, which include travel, waste and a lot of things outside the remit of BREEAM. In any BSF strategy for change, we expect the local authority will cover those. However, to some extent you have to build schools where the pupils are.

  Q717  Chairman: It still does not mean you should not have a transport policy.

  Ms Brooks: No, obviously not. We are providing some extra capital to schools to provide sustainable transport plans for them. All schools are going to be expected to have sustainable travel plans.

  Q718  Chairman: At your conference earlier this week, on Monday, many local authorities apparently said that when you were thinking about sustainability driving the selection of a preferred bidder by the local authority, it weighed as little as 2% of the total consideration. What do you say about that?

  Ms Brooks: There are two separate issues here.

  Q719  Chairman: It worries me that you have these really clever construction companies and they come along and they nudge the local authority and say, "Yeah, we've got to do something about sustainability, but we'll fix that for you."

  Ms Brooks: No. The evaluation, design and sustainability is separate from the fact that schools have to meet a certain level. It is a condition of the funding that schools have. All new schools have to meet that BREEAM "very good" level. That is separate. That is already a given. You are not evaluating bidders and saying, "Which of you is going to deliver BREEAM "very good"." It is a given that all those bidders are required to deliver that as part of the funding. It is not evaluating how good they are in that term. They have to do that as a requirement of being a short-listed bidder. They have to already have committed to deliver BREEAM "very good". Within that you can then choose between them, in terms of a lot of things around their design, including sustainability. The balance is up to the local authorities to some extent. We give guidance but the balance is down to them. The bar they all have to cover is BREEAM "very good". If we were to up our requirements on carbon neutral schools/low carbon schools, that would be a bar for all of them to jump before they were short-listed.


7   Ev 203 [DfES] Back

8   Ev 204 [DfES] Back


 
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