Green king

Paul King has a goal – to create a sustainable built environment. He believes we need to get to the point where people don’t talk about “environment” anymore; where sustainability is just another aspect of quality. “People won’t argue with you about whether or not a building has to be safe. We have to become equally insistent about a building being as a sustainable as possible,” he says.

King is chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), a campaign group set up in February this year after recommendations from the Sustainable Buildings Task Group. Its mission is to rationalise the plethora of initiatives and policies on sustainable design and create a clear set of guidelines agreed by green bodies, government and those involved in construction.

Membership has grown rapidly to about 150 organisations, King’s no nonsense approach bringing together the Environment Agency, Corus and English Partnerships, CABE, Hammerson, BRE and Gleeds, British Land, Barratt Homes and WWF-UK, to name a few.

He previously spent 13 years with the WFF (World Wide Fund for Nature), where he managed a team of experts on environmental issues and established the One Million Sustainable Homes campaign. “This was my first foray into the construction world and the obvious way forward for us as a campaign group could have been to start a campaign that was called something like Stop Building Bad Houses,” he says.

“But we deliberately called it One Million Sustainable Homes to break through the stalemate that was prevalent between environmentalists and the industry at that point. We put on the table a proposition that was pro-development but pro-sustainable development. It set the cat among the pigeons but it got people talking to us, and each other.

“From the outset we admitted that we didn’t know a lot about construction but we did know that developments, such as BedZED, could be built more sustainably. So, if it could be done, we wanted to find out what barriers there were to it being done as a matter of course.”

King and his team spoke to more than 400 organisations about what they perceived to be the difficulties in bringing sustainability to mainstream housing. The answers were distilled into the key factors that were preventing the industry moving in a sustainable direction.

I’m trying to find win-wins – ways of working with those on both sides

What the consultation process also achieved was to put in contact the main players in the debate – the people who had influence over these obstacles. Those organisations found themselves working together as partners to break down the barriers to sustainable housebuilding.

“This is what I want to bring to UKGBC,” says King. “My approach is about finding convergent objectives between those who are concerned about environmental impact and those who are trying to make a living delivering buildings, building houses, and so on. I’m trying to find win-wins; ways of working in partnership with those who have the skills and the knowledge on both sides of the argument.”

King is keen to emphasise that the UKGBC is not about to usurp tried-and-tested methods and initiatives and muscle its way into the sustainability arena. Instead, it wants to work with established organisations to ensure that everybody is pulling in the same direction. “We are about a campaign for a more sustainable built environment, and what we want to do is identify the barriers and then convene those in power – whether from industry or government – to work out how to remove them.

“We want to be a portal for people who want to find out about sustainable building in the UK. We want to set out our road map to sustainability, in terms of self-imposed targets and our reaction to others’ targets; a plan for how we’ll meet targets such as the 2016 deadline for zero carbon homes. Finally, we will campaign for the most important priorities at any given time, leading from discussions and our road map.”

One of the most important jobs will be the collecting and condensing of the disparate green initiatives into what King calls the UKGBC’s toolbox. “We want to be able to offer a UKGBC-endorsed toolbox that will help those in the construction industry understand the requirements clearly and work to a sustainable built environment. We’ll do this by facilitating peer reviews of a whole range of sustainability tools and seeking out the best to put into the toolbox. We will then promote them and ensure that they’re all complementary, so you won’t find half a dozen Phillips screwdrivers of the same size!”

BREEAM is potentially the first tool in the box. “BRE is a member of UKGBC and sees that membership as being beneficial to a larger uptake of BREEAM,” says King. “BRE continually reviews BREEAM but because this could be seen as a closed shop, it thinks it’s good that the UKGBC wants to review BREEAM, as does the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). However, the DCLG is saying that BREEAM isn’t perfect, so let’s have a look at it and see what needs to be done in order that it might become the basis for a Code for Sustainable Buildings, similar to the Code for Sustainable Homes. “We are all in the same boat, really. The BRE would love BREEAM to be taken up more widely, the DCLG would rather not have to reinvent the wheel and neither would we, but what we do want is to ensure that we have the best tool for the job.”

Some would say that inviting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) into the UK would create vital competition to ensure the best tool won. King believes that this would cause division without benefiting the industry. He accepts, though, that LEED should be investigated to assess where it betters BREEAM.

we want to offer a toolbox to help make the requirements clear

“LEED is less stretching than BREEAM but it has a far wider take-up; some 10,000 registrations a month,” he says. “That is interesting to us because the promoter of LEED is the US Green Building Council and we in the UK want to learn how we can expand the take-up of BREEAM. It raises the question of quality versus quantity: is it better to have less take-up of a more stringent code or much broader take-up of a slightly less stretching standard?”

BREEAM and other building assessment methodologies, such as Arup’s SPeAR and the controversial Merton Rule, will be reviewed in the coming months. And King urges anybody in the industry to come forward and present assessment tools to UKGBC if they think they will help the sustainability debate. “We exhort CIBSE to come forward with its best practice to talk about how we can collaborate and promote its initiatives. If they have something good, we need to know about it.”

The philosophy of UKGBC is, on first inspection, a good and gallant one. But the million-dollar question is how does it expect to enforce its campaign? How can it ensure that big business and government don’t turn their backs when the going gets too green? “It all comes down to the strength of the membership,” King says. “Generally speaking, if you’ve got an environmental agenda and you take it to government, there is no reason for the government not to take up that agenda unless it thinks it will conflict with the interests of UK plc. If you have a good chunk of UK plc behind you, government should support you.

“This means you have to take an approach that is more realistic in terms of the market than just trotting up to government saying we can do this if you give us millions of pounds. We all know that won’t work. It is about viewing government as one of many stakeholders, with its own particular roles and responsibilities. Therefore we’ll be looking at the roles and responsibilities of each of the key stakeholders and then asking government to do their bit; not to provide a silver bullet.

“Buildings are largely passive things. It is predominantly the activities within them that make them unsustainable. If you are already in a building that is hugely energy efficient and water efficient and doesn’t use toxic chemicals, then you almost have to go out of your way to behave unsustainably.

“At the moment, though, too many of the defaults are set to unsustainable designs rather than the opposite. Our aim – mine and that of everyone else in the construction industry and government – should be about building the best-quality buildings we can to make it as easy as possible for people to live sustainably. That means everybody doing their bit to remove the obstacles to mainstream sustainable building, be they historical, cultural, technological or financial.”