Making the link: climate policy and the reform of the UK construction industry

By S. Sorrell. 2003

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the barriers to energy efficiency in the construction of non-domestic buildings in the UK. The source of the barriers is argued to lie in the organisation of the construction industry, including the linear design process, the reliance on cost-based competitive tendering and the incentives placed upon different actors. The consequences include oversizing of equipment, reduced quality, neglect of whole life costs and lack of integrated design. Each of these problems can usefully be interpreted using concepts from the new institutional economics. While the barriers are well known to construction industry specialists, they are relatively neglected in the academic literature on energy policy. Furthermore, conventional policy measures such as building regulations leave these barriers largely untouched. The UK construction industry is currently undergoing a series of reforms which aim to change the relationship between different actors and to achieve improvements in product quality and productivity. While these reforms have the potential to address many of the barriers, the reform agenda makes practically no reference to sustainability. This paper argues that climate policy objectives must be integrated into the reform agenda if the UK is to begin the transition to a low carbon built environment.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e0f99d51e02b5bf93345289878103a297610572

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Citations in the corpus

Psychological factors influencing technology adoption: A case study from the oil and gas industry (2021, background): “Similar adoption barriers to those identified within O&G have been highlighted in the construction industry such as industry culture, no long-term incentive or interest in a project, competitive tendering, and poor collaboration between stakeholders (Sorrell, 2003).”
Near-term technology policies for long-term climate targets—economy wide versus technology specific approaches (2005, background): “are the reluctance to make no-regrets energy efficiency investments in some industries, in particular construction (Ayres, 1994; Sorrell, 2003 ) and our indifference to energy cost when we, e.g., select among holiday trips.”
Barriers to industrial energy efficiency: a literature review (2011, methodology): “Rohdin et al (2007) also draw on the Sorrell et al (2000c) framework in their analysis of barriers in the Swedish foundry industry.”
Do energy audits help reduce barriers to energy efficiency? An empirical analysis for Germany (2004, methodology): “Empirical analyses of the relevance of the various types of barriers and of the determinants often rely on theory-based case studies (DeCanio, 1994; deAlmeida, 1998; InterSEE, 1998; Ramesohl, 1998; Schleich et al. 2001; Sorrell et al. 2000; Sorrel et al. 2004; Sorrell, 2003).”
Successful adaptation to climate change across scales (2005, background): “The bidding processes tend to favour lowest cost bidders—which then leads to leastcost construction as opposed to most-appropriate construction (Sorrell, 2003).”