Plans to streamline sustainable infrastructure projects

The UK Green Building Council will today start work on a plan to cut costs and improve the delivery of district heating systems and other types of sustainable community infrastructure.

The task group is being run in partnership with the Zero Carbon Hub, and will produce guidance on the legal arrangements for delivering sustainable community infrastructure. The work is supported by the NHBC Foundation, E.ON and Berkeley Group.

Speaking ahead of the first meeting, Paul King, chief executive of the UK-GBC said: “In order for developers, utilities and local authorities to rise to the challenge of delivering community scale infrastructure, we need better guidance and standardised arrangements on the legal complexities. This new task group will help power up the community infrastructure revolution that the UK needs to reduce emissions from our built environment.”

The government has indicated the importance it places on community engagement and localism and community scale solutions are seen as an important component of the definition of zero carbon buildings.

This is the second UK-GBC task group to examine sustainable community infrastructure and aims to tackle the lack of standardised frameworks identified as a barrier by the first group. This means that every time partners come together to seek to deliver such infrastructure they, in effect, start from scratch on the legal arrangements which results in delays, cost and bureaucracy.

The task group will look to address this by producing a set of standardised arrangements.