Our sustainability team participated in the consultation process, contributing practical and technical insight alongside other assessors and professionals from across the built environment. The final scheme reflects a broad range of industry input, and our in-house assessors are ready to deliver assessments aligned with BREEAM V7, from the moment registration opens.

Our BREEAM team successfully guided this new build hospital to achieve BREEAM design stage certification.

Stronger emphasis on Life Cycle Assessment

One of the most notable updates to the scheme is the strengthened approach to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Projects can now gain credits for completing a post-construction LCA, as well as for sharing results to a publicly accessible database. This increased transparency is a positive step that will help drive improvement across the industry by establishing new benchmarks and offering valuable insight for clients. It also reflects a broader shift in focus toward more robust reporting and measurement of embodied carbon emissions.

Major changes to ‘Energy’ Category

Reducing the energy consumption of buildings through good design, is critical to deceasing carbon emissions and subsequent operating costs. The Energy category sees the most extensive updates. Two entirely new issues have been added:

• Ene 08 – Installed Controls
• Ene 07 – Flexible Demand Response

These changes reflect the growing importance of energy use optimisation and the need to future-proof building performance.

Additionally, the previous Ene 01 issue has been split into two:

• Regulated energy performance
• Operational energy

This allows for more precise assessment and optimisation of energy consumption at the design stage, setting the building up for low energy operations. Projects can now earn credits both for undertaking an operational energy estimate exercise and designing buildings that are expected to perform efficiently in use. BRE has also introduced a new scoring methodology based on collected data, helping to benchmark performance and reward efficiency more transparently. Our engineers have been delivering these assessments and are encouraged to see more interrogation of this area.

This revised energy category marks a notable shift — placing greater emphasis on how buildings are designed to perform in real life, not just on paper.

With support from our BREEAM team, Henrietta House achieved ‘BREEAM Excellent’ and won ‘Best Corporate Workplace’ at the British Council for Offices Lonon Awards in 2023.