Sustainable buildings: passivhaus, low carbon design and NABERS | Pablo Gugel, Director of Sustainability

The Construction Playbook: Government guidance on sourcing and contracting public works projects and programmes.

The progress we’ve seen in just the last five years has been significant, and it’s important to acknowledge that we’ve come a long way in a short period of time because we’ve been able to capitalise on the experience of others.The journey began with the original work with the MOJ, but carried on through to the Autumn Statement, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority beginning to talk about Platforms, and the creation of the Construction Innovation Hub itself.. It’s useful to reflect on how far we’ve come in terms of the significant policy changes and the fact that government departments, who have long been delivering massive infrastructure projects in diverse ways, are now starting to realise the benefits of alignment, harmonisation and rationalisation.

All of this helps to leverage the change going forwards, and also creates a hopeful background around the possibility that we’ll start to make changes quite quickly.We saw a similar process with BIM.Once the government established the BIM requirement, there was propagation to the private sector..

Defining the Need.As a result of the Infrastructure Projects Authority and the National Infrastructure Pipeline, we now have more clarity surrounding the issue of what needs to be delivered, for who, and the timescales.

Although that’s been available for some time, the conversations around commonality are a significant shift.

The Construction Innovation Hub’s work last year with the Defining the Need Report looked at the specific pipelines of infrastructure delivery (particularly social infrastructure), and analyzed what specification requirements were already in place, their maturity, and how much common ground existed..Prefabrication in factories (off-site construction) is often thought of as a panacea, a sure-fire way for construction sites to achieve greater productivity.

However, factories can also be run inefficiently, and if traditional construction methods are simply shifted into a factory setting, the benefits of MMC can be diluted or lost..In some cases, building off-site in a factory may even be less efficient than on-site construction.

For example, prefabricated 3D modules (used in modular construction) involve many additional costs compared to conventional build.These include transportation (a pre-fabricated room is mostly air, after all) and heavy plant for lifting modules into place.