RICS, one of the world’s leading built environment organisations, has
partnered with Ekkist, the UK’s first
health and well-being consultancy for the built environment, to launch a new guide to designing, delivering and managing healthier buildings.
A wealth of research shows how health is affected by a range of factors in
the built environment, including noise, lighting, temperature, poor air quality
and ease of doing physical activity.
With people spending as much as 90% of their time indoors, designing for
health can have significant benefits. For UK housing alone, research
published by BRE found that the annual cost to the NHS of leaving people in
the poorest housing was around £1.4 billion, with wider societal costs
amounting to £18.5 billion each year.
RICS’ new guide builds on its International
Building Operation Standards (IBOS). IBOS already goes beyond traditional
measures of a building’s performance to include the experience of the people
who use it; as part of this, the publication provides more advice on supporting
people’s health and wellbeing.
The information covers every stage of a project, from the initial definition
through to running the completed building. It sets out various ways in which
planning and construction professionals can include features that promote
health and well-being, or mitigate factors that damage health. This ranges from
improving air quality to tackling loneliness.
Alongside the guide, RICS has also announced a new strategic collaboration
with The International WELL Building
Institute (IWBI), whose WELL Building Standard is the world’s leading
roadmap for creating and certifying spaces that advance health and well-being,
already used by more than 44,000 projects worldwide. The organisations will
work together to encourage built environment professionals to adopt strategies
that advance health and well-being in buildings and organisations
worldwide. They will place particular focus on integrating health and
well-being into the valuation of properties, working to advance benchmarking,
regulatory frameworks and standards, with an emphasis on the built environment
sector in Europe. RICS’ new guidance has also been informed by the IWBI’s
standards among many others.
Paul Bagust, Head of RICS Property Practice, said: “Across the world,
millions of people will be relying on the expertise of property professionals
to ensure that the buildings they use on a daily basis are healthy
environments, while organisations will also be relying on the same people to
provide productive environments with well-being at their heart.”
Olga Turner Baker, Managing Director of Ekkist, said: “Health and well-being
has entered the forefront of forward-thinking companies’ agendas. Organisations
have realised that designing for health is pivotal to their success. As a
result, the adoption of global standards has grown. As one of the first
companies founded globally to solely focus on this discipline, Ekkist has seen
the change first hand. Certifications provide a common language that is
credible and clear, they help mitigate risk and future-proof buildings against
occupier trends, support organisations with frameworks for transparency and
accountability, and provide results. They create healthier and happier people
and places and add tangible social and economic value.”
Ann Marie Aguilar, Senior Vice President, EMEA, IWBI, said: “We are proud to
expand our existing relationship with RICS, and to pursue alignments between
the WELL Standard and IBOS. Our joint efforts will help to highlight the rising
importance of health and well-being in buildings, organisations and
communities, and how strategies to integrate health into the valuation process
can improve ESG performance.”
