Green for Good?

Paul King, Chief Executive Officer, UK Green Building Council

When the UK Green Building Council was launched almost 5 years ago, ‘green’ wasn’t particularly in vogue. I joined from a career in the ‘green movement’ that had spent a good deal of time and effort over a decade or more broadening its remit to ‘sustainable development’, encompassing social and economic considerations as much as environmental ones.

It seems odd then that three years into a recession, with no clear sight of the light at the end of the tunnel, and with a government so focused on austerity and reducing the deficit above all else, everything appears to have gone green. For starters, David Cameron said this coalition would be “the greenest government ever”. It has called its flagship ‘pay as you save’ home refurb policy ‘the Green Deal’. It established a pan-government and industry ‘Green Economy Council’, and drafted a ‘Green Economy Roadmap’. In responding to the Low Carbon Construction IGT, it set up a new ‘Green Construction Board’. Has the UK gone green, against all odds? Surely I should be celebrating.

But on a sobering January morning, when a glance out of the window makes you wonder if there really is something in those predictions that the end of the world is nigh, I wonder what this word ‘green’ really means. Because applying the label ‘green’ to a host of government-led initiatives just seems to highlight the fact that their and many other peoples’ priorities are simply elsewhere – namely the sorry state of our economy and certain aspects of our “broken” society.

Over the years I’ve stood on many platforms and said that ‘green’ shouldn’t mean something other than a part of what we mean by good quality, in just the same way that we now think about safety. About 15 years ago, Alan Knight, who was then head of sustainability at B&Q said to me something along the following lines: “if a customer walks into one of our stores and buys an electric drill, they assume it will be safe to use, that we will have made sure of that. But they don’t think the same way about whether it has been produced using responsibly sourced materials, in a sustainable and ethical way.” It was probably Alan who also said to me, “people say there’s no demand for sustainable timber. But I’ve never yet heard a customer come in and ask us for some unsustainable timber.”

 Good buildings, founded on good planning, good design, good engineering and construction, using good products and materials, provide people with good places to live and work. A good built environment enables communities to thrive. A sustainable built environment is one that does good – for people, society and the environment. Everyone wants a good home, a good place to work, and to live in a good community.

Let’s face it, people who can afford to are prepared to pay good money for a good quality product – a new car, a new kitchen – and they don’t obsess over the pay-back period, because they perceive the benefits that go way beyond the up-front price. They are interested in a good quality of life and they are prepared to work hard to get it.

So, wouldn’t it be great if the Great British public perceived the Green Deal simply as a Good Deal – one that would improve their comfort at home, future-proof their energy bills, and generally represent a good investment in their single biggest asset?

We continue to talk about whether we can prove ‘the business case’ for, or a value premium for green buildings. But let’s face it, if a building offers people a more comfortable living or working environment, with good levels of day-lighting, natural ventilation, healthy materials – in other words, if it feels good - and is well situated with easy access to good transport, why wouldn’t we pay a bit more, use it more, stay in it longer, be more productive in it, and feel good about it?

And remind me, when was the last time one of your customers asked you for an unsustainable, or bad building, and said they weren’t prepared to pay a penny more?

So does that mean we should drop the ‘green’ and become the ‘Good Building Council’ then? Well maybe that’s a bit premature, because the truth is that we can’t yet take it for granted that ‘green’ will be built in as a matter of course. We still need to draw attention to it, we still need to write it into contracts or it tends to get ‘value engineered’ out. As Jonathon Porritt emphasised in his typically eloquent way at the launch of our London 2012 Lessons Learned series, yes, these Games will be “least unsustainable” so far, but if we are honest, would we have delivered, if the ambitious sustainability requirements hadn’t been spelled out in legally binding contracts from day one?

So as we launch into 2012, which will see the ‘greenest Games ever’, a new Green Construction Board getting into its stride, and hopefully a world-leading Green Deal to begin the transformation of our leaky homes, it should certainly be our aim to embed all the elements of green into our fundamental notion of a good building – as much as we assume it will not fall down on our heads; nothing more, nothing less.

Paul King is the Chief Executive Officer of the UK Green Building Council.