Hussain Fathah

Performance measurement priorities & sustainability assessment tools: The case of BREEAM in the UK construction sector

The construction industry, whilst being essential for the UK’s socio-economic activities, continues to face chronic economic, social and environmental issues such as being unproductive, unprofitable, resource intensive and pollutive (Farmer, 2021). The industry’s performance measurement priorities have consequently evolved from monitoring economic performance to using Sustainability Assessment Tools (SATs) to measure a building’s sustainability. Popular SATs, such as Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology (BREEAM), give environmental issues priority (Zimmermann et al., 2019), but buildings should also be economically and socially sustainable. Moreover, SATs should complement existing industry performance priorities, giving due attention to areas which may not be factored into the decision making of a typical construction project.

Using BREEAM as a case study, this dissertation maps the evolution of BREEAM’s alignment to the industry’s performance measurement priorities. Factoring construction’s impacts across its value chain, gaps between BREEAM and the industry’s priorities would suggest shortcomings in measuring sustainability performance which need to be addressed. Using a framework, originally conceived by Van Vuuren and Middleton (2020), which categorised performance issues according to their influence on project decision making, it was found that BREEAM prioritised environmental performance, highlighting issues not really prioritised by the industry. However, it neglected certain aspects of social and economic performance.

Nevertheless, the dissertation questioned the influence of BREEAM certification on actual, rather than expected, environmental performance. Greenhouse gas emissions, water use and energy use data from building operations (portfolio-level), and embodied greenhouse gas emissions from building construction (project-level) were collected from five publicly listed developers in the UK. Some projects and portfolios reported above-average environmental performance, while others performed average or even worse-than-average across multiple issues. The results suggest that BREEAM certified buildings may not be delivering expected environmental performance.

The findings also imply that BREEAM needs to be tweaked to addresses the neglected social and economic issues, and performance gaps to remain an effective SAT. Till updates emerge, developers must acknowledge BREEAM’s limitations and use other complementary SATs or performance measures to ensure that their buildings are truly sustainable.