CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION THE ISSUES
Broadcaster Tim Wilcox chairs the main conference sessions
Sarah Cary, sustainable developments executive at British Land, has concerns about soft landings and the liabilities period
As regards the introduction of soft landings
Some 100,000 people are living in substandard accommodation. If we had had a war, we would be having an emergency response to it. Economically, I think we are in a similar place – Paul Morrell
– the period when buildings are handed over to the client by the project team – Sarah Cary, sustainability executive at British Land, fears it will interfere with the contracted relationship between each section in the supply chain. ‘You’re trying to mess with the difficulties period and liability period.’ She said she saw a danger in appointing a
soft landings consultant. ‘This needs to be the job of the building services engineers and the designers who have been involved.
Soft landings This issue of soft landings was debated at length during the first afternoon by Gary Clark, project director for REALL Project, School of the Built Environment, Heriot Watt University, and Tamsin Tweddell, partner at Max Fordham. Clark said industry’s failure to evaluate
the performance of buildings after handover meant structures were performing less efficiently than had been intended. ‘Despite the principles of soft landings
being known for 50 years, we still fail to consistently evaluate and fine-tune the in-use performance of our buildings,’ said Clark. Clark said he was encouraged by the recommendation by MPs that post-occupancy evaluation (POE) should be made mandatory on all public sector projects worth more than £5m. The MPs say that POE would help determine good and bad design practice,
18 CIBSE Journal November 2012
A panel of experts debate the challenges and opportunities facing industry
and inform design decisions. To ensure that the project team had a continued interest in the performance of the building once it was occupied, Clark recommended that practical completion was moved back 36 months to what he called ‘a practical occupation point.’ When asked by the audience about the cost
of soft landings, Clark said POE would cost around £30,000 for projects up to £30m. Tweddell said it was essential that soft landings with realistic energy targets are embedded in the project team at the start of the design process, to help close the gap between expectations and operational reality. Tweddell said it was important to identify operational risks and mitigate against them in the design process. She cited cases of schools not performing as well as expected because users did not understand their buildings. For example, operational windows were overridden because of noise, and night cooling switched off because of fears over security and birds flying in. Tweddell said it was important to tell contractors what the mission-critical areas were. ‘The lessons learnt can’t be value engineered out,’ she says. ‘Soft landings need to be integrated in the contract and not bolted on at the end.’
The financial climate On day two, the current economic situation and subsequent funding challenges were
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