Featured Project - Scottish Building Standards Agency

The Scottish Building Standards Agency is an executive agency of the Scottish Government responsible for writing the Scottish building regulations.

It is essential that building regulations and resulting guidance is based on consolidated information; and so SBSA’s research programme is an integral part of their work in providing a sound evidence base to support the review of the Building Standards and other building regulations.

The client naturally has a vested interest in wanting to understand how to improve the performance of a building fabric and ways to reduce CO2 emissions through the use of low carbon technologies. Improvement scenarios chosen and costed as a result of the research project enabled SBSA to both identify what is achievable and which techniques are likely to be adopted by future developers.

Unique Project Characteristics

Turner & Townsend assisted the SBSA in identifying and developing three ‘Benchmark’ buildings (a domestic house, a domestic Flat, and a non-domestic office) to achieve compliance with Section 6 of the Building Regulations. Compliance was demonstrated using the SAP and SBEM tools.

Turner & Townsend’s Contribution

Turner & Townsend was instrumental in highlighting a number of issues relevant to the improvement strategies as well as exercising controlled caution in the evaluation of potential risks in practice. For instance, whilst biomass was considered a cost effective option, the Turner & Townsend Team identified questions relating to its long-term viability with respect to fuel type, fuel source, supply, and efficiency at low energy demands.

The report has already established an appropriate level of performance for future Building Regulation amendments and has been utilised as a comparator against European regulations, including those in Scandinavia.

Ultimately, the output of SBSA’s report is not only impacting developers and the whole of Scotland’s construction industry but it is also providing a benchmark for European regulation, and as such the innovative report output is likely to have more far reaching effects for other geographical construction markets.