Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340-343)
MR JON
PRICHARD, MR
SEAMUS HEFFERNAN,
MR LOUIS
ARMSTRONG AND
MR MARK
GRIFFITHS
22 NOVEMBER 2006
Q340 David Lepper: My local college
of further education is investing quite a lot and has been enabled
by the Government to invest quite a lot in training for the construction
trades at the moment. I suspect the same might be happening in
other places as well. As civil engineers you, in particular, keep
a watch on the kind of work that is going on in training of that
kind, I imagine, and are the courses which are available at the
moment sufficiently in tune with the need to deal with the kinds
of issues we have been discussing in terms of housebuilding, and
so on?
Mr Prichard: We accredit courses
in civil engineering and there are 78 civil engineering departments
across universities in the United Kingdom. We have a slightly
more stand-offish approach in the further education sector because
that is not a direct qualification which leads to professional
membership, it is a subsidiary, and we have not got the resource
to actually do that. We do take a view of it, but we tend to do
it through bodies such as the Construction Industry Council and
the Construction Industry Training Board Construction-Skills,
who do take a close look at that level, but we certainly have
a very good view on what is happening at the HE level and there
are concerns with the funding of engineering at HE level which
I can articulate if you wanted to hear more about it.
David Lepper: Okay. Thank you.
Q341 Chairman: Could I just bring
our inquiry to a close with a little bit of questioning about
large public and commercial buildings. That is where the citizens
spend a lot of their time, if they are in employment, and the
better the performance of that type of structure obviously takes
some of the pressure off other sectors of the economy in terms
of their contribution, in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I suppose the iconic building which in the last twelve months
has caught the imagination has been the CWS Building in Manchester,
which has got the largest array of photovoltaic cells on it and
it has also got a lot of wind energy. They have taken the very
responsible view of saying, "Right, we're going to incorporate
that into our new building." But then, on the other hand,
you see a great deal of refurbishment work going on on existing
sixties' structures and seventies' structures. I am not getting
the sense—and maybe I am wrong—that those buildings
are being brought up to the highest possible energy efficiency
standards either from the point of view of insulation, external
cladding materials, these kinds of things, or the installation
of the most modern heating systems. One of the things which came
out of our Bioenergy Report was the fact that heat accounts for
a third of our emissions and the opportunity to use renewable
sources of fuel in more modern boilers, or combined heat and power
systems offers some potentially very interesting areas for savings.
You commented about the lack of inducement, Mr Armstrong, for
the social landlord to make changes. Can you give us some commentary
about the environment for business and for property companies
to become involved in this whole area? Is, for example, Schedule
A structured sufficiently well to give the kind of inducement
which you said the private landlord might need, and from the engineers,
are we seeing building refurbishment being used advantageously
to move the whole energy saving agenda forward?
Mr Armstrong: I think we are helped
by the EU's Energy Performance Directive in commercial buildings,
and I think from memory all those extensions over 1,000 square
metres have now to be the catalyst for bringing the whole building
up to modern standards. So I think your point about whether refurbished
older buildings are being brought up to standard is now covered.
I think in terms of buildings as a whole, we are working on a
number of levels. One is the value of green buildings. Are they
intrinsically more valuable to the investor? Will the investor
pay more for this? Are they more valuable to the company? The
jury is still out as far as the market is concerned, but in theory
there should progressively be—and we are working with the
International Valuations Standards Committee on just this issue
and there is a big meeting in Vancouver next March on this. One
issue will be to get the value of buildings to be greater to the
investor and appreciated more by users. Second is the evidence
from the human resource community that those individuals who occupy
green buildings like them, especially the younger generation,
and the efficiency and productivity is improved, the retention
is improved and there are very good people reasons why the building
should be brought up to modern standards. Our facilities management
faculty—and a lot of our members do this on a sophisticated
basis—is trying to get best practice instilled in them to
make sure that they are taking every opportunity for the good
of the business as well as the value of the property and its running
costs to bring it up to standard. You have seen those pictures,
perhaps, in the Evening Standard recently of all those
buildings at Canary Wharf with all those lights blazing, and we
are trying to get, as the Home Office does, movement sensitive
lighting so that lights are all turned off and you do not blame
the cleaners for the fact that they are on all night over 40 floors,
as was seen in Canary Wharf just last week. So I think the commercial
sector, all the big landlords and developers, is taking corporate
responsibility very seriously now, not just paying lip service
to greening up their accounts, as might have been the case a few
years ago. They are genuinely concerned about all the new developments
being seen to be new standards. The best companies are equally
concerned about occupying buildings like that and individuals
are keen to work in them. So I think progressively things are
improving.
Q342 Chairman: You have put a lot
of emphasis on what is good corporate social responsibility. Are
there any barriers to progress in this which government should
remove?
Mr Armstrong: It is difficult
off the top of my head to think of ones which government should
remove. One old issue is the problem of VAT on refurbished building
as opposed to the 5% rate—
Q343 Chairman: Does Schedule A need
to be changed in terms of the way equipment in buildings is written
down to encourage a more rapid turnover and re-engineering of
the energy systems in buildings, for example?
Mr Armstrong: That is certainly
a possibility.
Mr Griffiths: I think there is
scope for that. One issue you do need to bear in mind is that
within the existing energy infrastructure there is quite a lot
of embedded energy and therefore if you replace things willy-nilly
you generate a whole load of CO2 in producing the replacement
plant. That is quite a careful calculation and you have to think
about that in some depth to make sure that actually you are not
making losses in one area and substituting for gains in another.
Really the point at which to do it is when equipment is obsolete
and then to make sure that you have a very good high specification.
One of the technologies which was mentioned earlier, which I suspect
is under-utilised, is ground source heat technology. One of the
interesting things about that technology is that it is almost
universally available and whereas in the past the ducting for
gathering that heat source was laid horizontally, so you needed
somebody with a garden, for example, to deal with it, now they
do vertical installations. So even in very dense urban situations
you can make use of that technology and I think that is something
which perhaps quite often gets overlooked.
Mr Prichard: Answering your question
on building refurbishment and looking at that area, I think in
terms of the leaps and strides which the best are now doing and
introducing in terms of their sustainability policies and being
impacted on by the fact that clients are beginning to ask more
and more for an environmentally friendly treatment of an existing
building, I think we are finding there is an increase of performance
in this area. Those who are not being led in that way, and there
is clearly a spectrum of performance in this area, are being impacted
on by things like the escalating Landfill Tax so that they are
now, having had the Landfill Tax increases, they are having to
consider clever ways of dealing with the waste on site, recycling
the waste on site and incorporating waste re-use into the structure.
Those performance things are happening. I think overall any building
which has had work done on it, as Louis said, will attain the
standards because if you maintain the façade, the building
behind it does now have to meet with the minimum standard. But
the difficulty we have got is that it is a minimum standard and
therefore you have to look at how often you start lifting the
bar and taking that standard higher.
Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much
indeed for your many and varied, and well-informed, comments.
We have learnt a great deal from what you have had to say. Can
I also take the opportunity of formally thanking you for your
written evidence. I was particularly interested in the little
table in the RICS evidence, which I think David Lepper, representing
his seat in Brighton, will have taken very careful notice of,
of the amount of photovoltaics, the point seven of a nuclear power
station, and the other measures of energy supply in the form of
windmills which will be required to keep his city alone going
in the future! So you have given us an awful lot to think about.
If there is anything more you want to send to us, then we will
obviously be delighted to hear from you, but thank you very much
for giving evidence this afternoon.
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