Green Week: Future Have Your Say

Green Week on Place North West, published in association with the Environment Agency, Envirolink Northwest and Hill Dickinson

►Richard James, Hill Dickinson

▼Steve Martin, GVA Grimley

The UK has always promoted opportunities for entrepreneurs to pursue new ideas and initiatives and this has seen the introduction of an abundance of new materials, technologies and methods of working to support a low and zero carbon community.

One of my main concerns is that some of these new materials and technologies will be untried and untested. I have no doubt that there will be situations arising whereby these new materials and technologies are used in developments, either inappropriate or installed by unskilled labour which, at best, will fail to perform as intended, or at worst, give rise to latent defects which will require costly solutions and involve an abundance of legal action against designers and contractors alike.

There is a fundamental need to ensure that the Government provides the opportunity for materials and technologies to be tested in a robust manner and perhaps certified in advance to ensure that this potential situation is averted.

A huge investment will be required in training to ensure the new skills required, both in understanding the design intent and the installation of these materials and technologies are fully understood and the performance is achieved as intended.

Steve Martin is a director in the building consultancy team at GVA Grimley in Manchester