Many in the industry will have been dismayed by the recent revelation that the government has only met 9% of its sustainability targets.

While this is regrettable, there underlies a more pertinent failure within the Office of Government Commerce and the way it procures and runs its buildings.

In his disposition to the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, the OGC deputy chief executive Peter Fanning commented: “My point is that post-occupancy evaluation (POE) does not help the planet at all ... what helps the planet is whether the buildings being used by departments are less harmful to the planet.”

What failure then, that in the upper echelons of the civil service there is a belief that the performance of buildings is “right first time”. The series of Probe articles, and more recent examples such as the article on Red Kite House, demonstrate that it is unlikely that performance is optimum once the design team have fulfilled their duties on site.

And that is why POE is central to improving the performance of low and zero carbon building design which are vital to helping the planet, no matter what regular contributors to the letters page of the BSj think.

Iain Fraser, environmental engineer, London

Source

Building Sustainable Design