BREEAM 2018 - An Assessor view at Launch Stage

[edit] Technical Criteria

On a first read of the BREEAM 2018 criteria, the majority of changes seem reasonable, with some being pleasantly forward thinking. I've listed a few below which I feel are some of the noteable changes:

There are however also a selection of changes that seem somewhat poorly thought through in my opinion:

• WORK IN PROGRESS*

[edit] Sustainable Procurement Plan

The production of a sustainable procurement plan during RIBA Stage 1, in my opinion, is a poor decision by BRE. During RIBA Stage 1 the extent of information surrounding the project should be limited, and as such being able to set a sensible set of aims, objectives and targets is unreasonable. I feel as a result of this, very generic sustainable procurement plans will be produced, rather than well thought through plans with SMART targets which may drive procurement activities.

[edit] LCA Submission

I may well live to be proven wrong about this. But I feel submitting MAT 01 results to BRE at RIBA Stage 2/pre-planning is going to be an administrative disaster. Many BREEAM projects will not be registered during RIBA Stage 2, and as such there will be relatively little to link the MAT 01 submission to the assessment. While an assessor can use their email submission as BREEAM evidence that this was completed, I can't help but feel this process has not been thoroughly thought through.

[edit] Timing of Release and Availability of Resources

As per usual with the release of BREEAM schemes, BRE have released BREEAM 2018 prior to the full range of required documents being available. In addition, registrations for the previous scheme (BREEAM 2014) have been closed, so unfortunately there is currently no fully functioning BREEAM scheme available. There also does not seem to have been much in the way of testing of tools etc prior to their release.

As of 28/3/18 9am (3 weeks after launch) there are still 3 significant resources outstanding, which personally I believe make BREEAM 2018 unreasonably difficult to use:

[edit] Guidance Notes - Ecology

GN34 is unavailable. This is a checklist which confirms whether an ecologist is required prior to site configuration being set in order to achieve LE 02. Unfortunately LE 02 is a pre-requisite to achieving LE 03, which in turn is a pre-requisite to achieving LE 04. That unfortunately is a rather large chunk of a BREEAM assessment which I'd typically expect to achieve at least some of on an assessment. While my projects may go through significant early stage ecology work, without the documentation available from BRE, I'm unable to confirm to design teams that they can achieve the credits. Therefore my buildings will score artificially low scores due to BRE's late running scheme.

[edit] Scoring and Reporting Tool

While BREEAM projects is available to assess projects and conduct pre-assessments, BRE have yet to release an offline scoring and reporting tool. Following significant consultation with the assessor base which appear to overwhelmingly suggest that a fully online system is not currently appropriate, it's surprising that this tool was not produced prior to the closure of registrations of BREEAM 2014.

[edit] ENE 01 Methodology

This is probably a lesser problem for me personally, however, there is currently no methodology available for ENE 01. The criteria in the manual is somewhat suggestive of it being the same/similar methodology to BREEAM 2014, but with the quantity of credits available and the ease of achieving said credits made harder. Having reviewed the ENE 01 section of the projects website, it now seems that an energy performance ratio can have a negative value. This is a fairly significant change from previous BREEAM schemes. Unfortunately the ENE 01 calculator on BREEAM projects is not displaying said negative values, so quantifying the impact is incredibly difficult.

[edit] Training

[edit] My current feeling towards using the scheme

[edit] See Also

Sending a positive message to the team regarding BREEAM