Decarbonisation Plan Webinar 2. First steps towards developing your organisation’s Decarbonisation Plan

Good information management is crucial when it comes to looking after a building and for creating a decarbonisation plan.

This is the Q&A session from the session. Questions asked by the chairs from questions posted in the question chat and from thoughts arising during the webinar. The answers were provided by the consultants Beatie Blakemore and Elizabeth Flower who presented the webinar.

Minimum information required for a Decarbonisation Plan

Question: Is there a minimum amount of information needed to develop a Decarbonisation Plan, and what is the impact of proceeding with limited information?

Answer: The most critical information is building plans (size and layout) and energy consumption data (energy bills). Together, these enable a basic assessment of building performance. Other information, such as heritage assessments, can be researched and produced by the appointed professional team if not already available. Where no conservation management plan exists, a high level heritage significance assessment can form part of the Decarbonisation Plan itself.
Any gaps in information help identify what expertise is required. For example, if heritage information is missing, a consultant with specialist heritage experience should be appointed to produce it.

Knowing which surveys are necessary (eg for churches and limited budgets)

Question: Without prior knowledge of decarbonisation solutions, how does an organisation know which surveys are required, particularly where costs are prohibitive?

Answer: A condition survey is the most critical first step. If conducted within the last five years, it may provide sufficient baseline information for a Decarbonisation Plan. Where funds are limited and information is incomplete, deciding which surveys are necessary should be discussed with the consultant team. The guidance provides an ideal list, but this can be tailored and negotiated based on the building and available resources.

What organisations can do internally to reduce consultant costs

Question: How can organisations reduce costs by gathering information internally?

Answer: The Decarbonisation Plan template itself can act as the basis of a consultant brief. Organisations can use it to clarify scope and expectations. Supporting guidance includes fact sheets and a glossary that translate technical terms into accessible language, helping organisations understand outputs and act as informed or “confident clients”.

Data gathering tools and templates

Question: Is there a template for organisations to gather data in advance?

Answer: While there is no single data capture template, the guidance includes a checklist outlining required and optional information, such as drawings and records, explaining what is essential and where it may be found.

Accounting for future building use in a Decarbonisation Plan

Question: Can future or proposed changes to building use be included in a Decarbonisation Plan?

Answer: Yes. Understanding future use is essential. Underused buildings are inherently inefficient, so plans should consider intensifying use where appropriate to support financial resilience. Future use informs prioritisation and sequencing of interventions, often more so than theoretical carbon saving potential. Decisions are usually shaped by funding availability, capital projects, heritage constraints, and organisational objectives.

Role of statements of significance

Question: Is a statement of significance a key document when considering decarbonisation measures?

Answer: Yes. If a conservation management plan or statement of significance already exists, it should inform the plan. If not, and the building is listed, an assessment of significance should be produced as part of the Decarbonisation Plan. Understanding heritage value is essential when evaluating potential harm and weighing options, requiring appropriate heritage expertise within the consultant team.

Size and composition of the client team

Question: Is there a minimum number of people required in a client team, and what makes a client team effective?

Answer: There is no minimum or maximum number. Success depends on having the right people involved—particularly those with detailed, day-to-day knowledge of the building. Problems arise when these individuals are excluded from discussions with the design team.
Diversity of perspectives and expertise strengthens the plan. Even in small organisations, involving people with different levels of technical understanding and operational insight leads to more robust outcomes.

Speakers:

Elizabeth Flower: Associate & Architect, Haworth Tompkins

Beatie Blakemore: Associate Director, Project Lead & Architect, Haworth Tompkins

Chaired by:

Dan Miles: Senior Sector Development Adviser, leading the Sector to Net Zero project, supporting heritage organisations on their journey to net zero, Historic England

Feimatta Conteh: Senior Manager, Environmental Responsibility, Arts Council England, Co- manager of the ACE-HE decarbonisation project

Jess: So let me introduce our chairs of today. We have Dan Miles, Senior Sector Development Advisor at Historic England and responsible for running the Sector to Net Zero project, which is supporting the heritage sector towards net zero. And we have Feimatta Conteh, who is the Senior Manager and Environmental Responsibility at Arts Council England and co-manager of the Supporting Cultural and Heritage organisations to decarbonise their historic buildings, which this webinar is part of.

Over to you, guys!

Feimatta Conteh: Hello, thank you so much for that introduction, and lovely to have everyone here with us today. As Jess just said, Dan and I have co-funded and supported this project, so I'll just do a little brief introduction and then I'll hand over to Beatie and Elizabeth, who are taking us through. I know that not everyone who's in the webinar today will have joined our webinar last week, where we gave more of an introduction to the project and an overview of all of the elements of it, so I won't do a full overview of the project. If you want, there's information on the Historic England website, the guidance that has come through, that was developed through that project. I've just posted a link there in the chat.

And as Jess was saying, the recording of last week's webinar will be available, probably in April, so you can watch the first 10 minutes or so of that. But just to say that this project has been funded through a joint statement of purpose between Arts Council England and Historic England to think about the support that we can give to the overlapping sectors that we both support through our work.

So, looking at cultural and heritage organisations that are based in historic buildings. So in the project, we recruited 3 organisations who met those criteria, and then we commissioned a team through a tender led by Howarth Tompkins with their partners Skelly Couch, Gardner Theobald, and Connisbee to carry out decarbonisation plans of those 3 buildings and produce a series of resources and guidance for that. And in this series of webinars, we're going through that guidance and digging into it and really hoping that it's something that's useful for the people who are in the webinars and people who are watching the webinars later.

So I'll hand over in a second to our hosts, to Beatie and Elizabeth, who've led the team in this. And I'll just remind you, the box there for questions for presenters. So if you've got any thoughts or questions that come up as Beatie and Elizabeth are taking us through, please post them in there, and then Dan and I will field those to Beate and Elizabeth once we've gone through the presentation.

So, I hope that's everything that I need to say right now. And I'm really looking forward to hearing from Beatie and Elizabeth. So, over to you guys now.

Beatie Blakemore: Thanks, Feimatta! So, hello! Welcome to the second of four webinars that we're delivering to help to demystify the process of commissioning decarbonisation plans and to explain the roles of the client and consultant team!

So, as a sort of suite of webinar forum series, we're really explaining the steps involved in undertaking a plan and introducing the suite of resources that are available on the Historic England website as part of the Decarbonisation Pilot.

Now, today's webinar is really about defining the objectives and the scope of a decarbonisation plan. Now, I think I've seen some of the chat coming in. Some of you are from sort of client bodies who might be interested in commissioning this piece of work. Some of you may be professional consultants.

Today's session is really sort of directed primarily at those client teams who might be thinking about doing a decarbonisation plan and want to understand better how you go about it. How do you— what are the kind of client-led activities that you need to do right at the beginning of the process?

So today's webinar, like last week, is going to be divided into two parts. I'm going to begin by explaining how you begin to define the scope, the aims, and the objectives of a decarbonisation plan, and how you do that by really first identifying what kind of resources you have available, establishing your internal team, and starting to gather information about your building. And then Elizabeth is going to take us through some more detailed steps in terms of appointing consultants and undertaking initial briefing and site visit utilities.

So today's webinar is really covering the first two steps of the six-step process that we've developed as part of the decarbonisation guidance and template. So, definition and gathering information. So to begin, the first step of the process is to define the aims and objectives of the decarbonisation plan for the key stakeholders. And it's worth at this point really asking yourself some questions.

So what is the intended purpose of the decarbonisation plan? How do you think you're going to use it? What resources do you have? And that means both capital resources, funding, but also we're thinking very much about staff time and levels of information understanding that you already have about the building and what you might need to gather or commission as part of this piece of work. And finally, knowing all of that, you can start to identify the support, the external support you might need to produce the plan, so professional consultants and surveys.

So, the purpose of your plan will be very specific to your organisation and the scale and complexity of your building or site, and you may have a number of, of sort of holistic and sort of connected goals for how you might use your plan.

So to begin, you may want to help define or meet organisational sustainability goals. So that might include a pathway to net zero, for example. You may already be engaged with other cross-sector initiatives such as the Theatre Green Book or the Gallery Climate Coalition, so there are a lot of kind of sector-based organisations who are helping to support cultural and heritage organisations in defining their organisational sustainability goals, and the decarbonisation plan can help you to deliver much more focused and targeted enhancements to your buildings and operational carbon in particular. You may have local authority climate commitments that you need to meet, and you may have already sort of defined an aspiration to meet net zero carbon, but need to identify a timeframe and a process for reaching that. You may also want to understand better how your building performs, the current performance of the building.

So by that, what we mean is how much energy it uses and what are the carbon emissions associated with that energy use. You may also be aware of thermal comfort issues, so perhaps your building is too cold in winter, too drafty, perhaps it overheats in summer, perhaps you're worried about how that is going to change as the climate changes, and really you want to think about kind of long-term resilience of the building to climate change. Perhaps your primary focus is to reduce energy bills and to understand how opportunities for energy-saving measures could help you achieve that. I think at this point it's also really worth focusing on long-term risks and resilience.

So you may already be aware of risks or sort of defects in your fabric or your services, but as I say, you may also be thinking ahead long term to what the upcoming risks and vulnerabilities might be in the face of future climate change. So the decarbonisation can help you to appraise the condition of the fabric and the services and to identify the ways in which that condition might be affecting the energy efficiency and performance of the building as a whole.

So together, that holistic understanding that you're building through a decarbonisation plan can help you to secure that long-term resilience. The next question to ask yourself is, how are you going to use the plan once it's done? So it could be used to help plan capital projects as well as ongoing maintenance works and perhaps focus those maintenance works more closely towards those critical maintenance activities that might help energy efficiency. You might also use the plan to help support grant funding applications, and many of the key funders that you are probably familiar with now have environmental protection and responsibility as a sort of core investment principle.

So this is becoming an increasingly critical part of building a case for support in funding terms. The next question to ask yourself is what resources you have available already within your organisation or from external funders to help support the production of a decarbonisation plan. And it's really important to note here that the scope of the plan has to be tailored appropriately to both the scale and complexity of the building and the resources that you have available. So that includes staff time, and knowledge, both at leadership level and within your operational staff. Building about information about the building and its services, as well as financial resources that you might need to pull together to support professional fees and surveys.

So at this point, it's worth thinking about who might form your client team, and we've noticed some sort of key figures here, or teams that are important in terms of who the professional consultants will need to engage with throughout the production of the plan. Now, I'm aware that for some of you who are sort of part of client bodies within the room today, you might have much, much more complex governance structures and team structures. Some of you may be, by contrast, an organisation with only 2 or 3 members of staff.

So again, how you build your client team has to be really appropriate to the nature of your building and organisation. But I think the key thing here is that for the larger buildings in particular, you may want to draw on expertise from quite a broad range of people who might be engaging with your building on a day-to-day basis.

So, leadership and trustees who are really defining the kind of aims and goals of an organisation and setting those sort of strategic priorities. You might already have a sustainability lead as well who's part of that conversation. Or you might be seeking to develop that as part of the decarbonisation plan itself. If you have a facilities manager or facilities team, they're going to be really important in terms of sort of communicating information about how the building and its services are used and maintained. And then technical and operational staff are going to be critical to help your consultant team understand how the building is run and operated on a day-to-day basis.

At this point, it's also worth starting to gather the background information about the building and site and services that are going to be really important to help the consultant team understand what they're working with. And there's quite a range of information that you're going to need to pull together, some of which you may have before you commission the plan, some of it you may need professionals to actually help you scope out and source.

There is quite a bit of information about this on the Historic England website that takes you through the kind of information that you might need and where to find it. We're going to take you through some of the kind of key examples of this information today. So drawings are really, really important.

So, as a consultant team coming to a decolonisation plan, drawings are critical to understand how the building is arranged, what its relationship to the wider site context is, how big it is, and that's a really important consideration when we're thinking about the energy use per meter squared, the energy sort of intensity of the building.

Some of you may have good records already of the building that include architectural drawings or indeed services layout, so mechanical electrical services layouts can also be incredibly useful at this stage. If you don't have that information to hand, there are certain sources that you can look for. So you might look at the planning portal for previous planning applications. There may be local records and archives that you can look at, and if you really don't have any drawn information about the building, it might be sensible at this stage to commission a measured survey as well.

Heritage information is also really critical, and again, not all organisations will have this already to hand, but many of you working in the heritage and cultural sectors may already have a conservation management plan or heritage statement, and this can really help your incoming team to understand the history and development of the site and its relative significance.

And again, if that information isn't to hand, it may be something that you wish to commission as part of the plan. Condition surveys and maintenance schedules are also really, really important, and I think we've talked last week and we'll certainly talk in the next two webinars about the sort of critical link between fabric condition and energy performance.

So, understanding the condition and the sort of risks and defects within your building and the services systems are very important to help drive both the understanding of the current condition but also how you prioritise future changes. And as part of the case studies that we undertook as part of this study, some of the buildings that we worked with had condition surveys already alongside quite detailed maintenance schedules. Others didn't, and those were then commissioned as part of the decarbonisation plan.

And then finally, building use data about how the building is used from day to day is also really important for interpreting the metered energy data that we'll be looking at next. So, this is a kind of example of the simple summary of how a building is used that we put together with the clients as part of the case studies.

So, looking at how a building is used day to day, how it's managed, and that might also include a summary of ownership as well, particularly where you have multiple owners or stakeholders involved in the management and looking after the building. Days and hours of opening is really critical, and as well as the different kinds of people who might use the building, so from staff, visitors, and other stakeholders. So this helps to sort of develop an understanding of the day-to-day use, but it is also really important for how we then interpret and assess tabulated metered energy data such as this.

So, you might have just utility bills, you might have energy meters which give us a more detailed breakdown of how energy is used across the building. But it'll typically come to a consultant team in this sort of format, and then it will be up to your professional consultants to then drill down into this data and interpret it as part of the assessment of building performance. So at this point, we're going to ask a bit of a poll, primarily directed at, again, the sort of building owners or stakeholders within the room, about what information you might already have about your building.

So, before you've started your decarbonisation plan, what of these elements might you be able to get hold of relatively easily? Now, for those of you in the room who aren't a client, perhaps you're a consultant or another interested party. It'd be really interesting to hear from you, perhaps in the chat, about the kind of information that you most typically struggle to get hold of at the beginning of a project like this, the beginning of either a capital project or indeed a decarbonisation survey if it's something you're involved with.

And we're going to give you a little bit of time to think about this, and Jess, you might want to give some summary of how we're doing on the results.

Jess: Yeah, so, 71% of people in the room so far do have access to architectural drawings, which I imagine is quite a relief. And that's closely followed by utility bills and building use, the— an idea of occupancy hours, etc. Lowest is maintenance schedules or plans and condition surveys. People don't seem to have as much access to those, so you're still looking at about a third of people, and building service drawings is also coming out quite low. We give it another 30 seconds for people to cast their votes, as it were, before I close the poll. Yeah, a few last-minute votes coming in now. Votes. I don't know if that's the right word. Brilliant!

So 86% have access to their architectural drawings, with 71% utility bills, and everything else is coming out a little bit lower, the lowest being maintenance schedules or plans. And I will hand back over to you.

Beatie Blakemore: Thank you! So I think we're going to now move over to Elizabeth, who's going to take you through a little bit more detail the process of establishing your consultant team and starting to get started on your decarbonisation plan.

Elizabeth Flower: Thank you, Beatie! So yes, I'm now going to talk through the first steps that will be carried out when commissioning a decarbonisation plan, starting with the appointment of the consultant team. So, as BT mentioned, the objectives and information gathered during the scoping of the plan will hopefully have informed which consultants are needed and appointed by the client to develop it. In many cases, decarbonisation plans are led and developed by services engineers, but for listed and historic buildings, an architect will be required to record Architects may be conservation architects, or they could possibly also be supported by services, or MEP engineers will also be required, and they will assess the existing building performance and the relative energy-saving benefits any improvements.

A structural engineer might be required, particularly if there are any known structural issues, or they could be appointed during the production of the plan if there are any structural implications of any of the recommended improvements that need to be developed in more detail. A building surveyor may be required if there are gaps in the client survey information.

So as noted in the poll, some of you don't have a good record information on building fabric condition surveys, so yeah, a surveyor may be needed to join the team. And then finally, a cost consultant may be needed to give more accurate advice on the holistic cost of any improvement options. More information on appointing the right consultant team and also where to find properly accredited professionals is also available on the Historic England website, and there was a specific fact sheet on professional competencies that was produced as part of the study.

So once the appointed consultant team— oh, sorry, excuse me— and more information— once the appointed consultant team will begin with an— are on board, they will begin with an in-depth review of available information.

So this includes information provided by the client alongside their own desk or web-based research, and they'll do this in order to gain a thorough understanding of this specific building, so its history, location, use, etc., and this will allow them to inform and properly tailor briefing workshops and site visits accordingly. They will also identify any gaps in the client information and perhaps in the scope as well, and they may then also identify areas of key investigation or any additional surveys that are required.

So next, they will hold a briefing workshop, or perhaps depending on the scale of organisation and the scale of the client team group, a series of workshops that should be attended by the key building staff. So as Beatie mentioned, a group who can give a proper holistic and in-depth knowledge of the building. So, these can include leadership, staff, facilities management, and operational staff, as Beatie outlined earlier.

And key questions the consultant team might ask to develop their understanding of the site include: how and when is the building or site used? Are there any seasonal fluctuations in use or anomalous out-of-hours uses? What are the operational challenges? For example, financial constraints or spatial limitations. And also linked to this, are there any future ambitions to address these, such as increasing revenue through hiring out any of the spaces? They'll ask about any known thermal comfort issues, as Beatie mentioned again, drafts, overheating, air quality, and where these are specifically happening in the building. They'll ask about how the building is maintained and who's responsible for that maintenance, which may also link to building ownership.

So, is the building owned outright, or is it leased and there's another organisation responsible for the building fabric and structure? It's important for the consultant team to also understand how the organisation is governed and funded, and the environmental targets and goals that are already in place. So, as you can see, these questions will cover the building and organisation holistically, not simply focusing just on building services and sustainability.

The next step is for the consultant team to carry out a site visit, and they will need to access all inhabited spaces, plant rooms— and that includes risers and possibly locked, hidden away service cupboards— roofs where they're safe, safely accessible, roof voids and loft spaces, and also other external spaces. So any gardens or courtyards and etc. And to make the best use out of the site visit, logistical considerations need to be properly considered.

So allowing enough time for the client team to properly investigate and fully tour the building, ensuring that there aren't any events or uses going on that will prevent them access to certain spaces, and ensuring that there's adequate staff supervision and attendance from the right people.

So having the right keys in place and giving access to all areas. So, to show what this might look like in reality, this is just a quick example from one of the case study buildings that was visited as part of the pilot study, Shire Hall. So, we actually began with an online introductory meeting, just to introduce the consultant team and client team, and discuss the overarching objectives of the plan. We then visited site.

So, the site visit was attended by us, Howard Tompkins, as architects, and also Skelly Kooch as services engineers. But in this instance, the quantity surveyor and also the building condition survey weren't carried out at the same time, so those consultants didn't need to visit during the initial visit. The site visit began with a 1.5-hour client workshop, so a really thorough, in-depth briefing workshop where all of the questions I previously outlined were discussed in detail, followed by a 4-hour building tour of the whole museum, accompanied by their facilities management staff.

In this case, Shire Hall lacked knowledge on their record information, and so they provided the information that they did have to us in a meeting room, and we all sat down and had a thorough review of the paper-based building records. That they had available. At the same time, during the site visit, the services engineers Skelly Cooch carried out a services condition survey.

So, this is a— we'll talk more in depth about surveys in the following webinar, but a qualitative survey looking at the systems that are in place, an overview of their condition, and how they work together. And then again, a separate survey, a qualitative survey on thermal imaging, which was carried out after dark.

So subject to available resources, other site-based assessments might be required and can be advised on in more detail by the consultant team. So they could include a quantitative thermographic assessment, U-value testing of the external envelope, airtightness testing, further fabric condition surveys, and pathology surveys to identify damp and rot. And these are more detailed surveys that the design team are possibly best placed to advise on whether they'll be required or not. And we're going to talk about these in more detail in the next session and also look at how the survey data is then used and assessed and interpreted by the design team to develop a holistic understanding of the building's performance and context.

So, the final two webinars of the series, Webinar 3, will cover the types of surveys and assessments commissioned as part of the decarbonisation plan, and as I said, how these are used to understand the building performance.

And webinar 4 will explain how retrofit interventions are appraised and prioritised as part of a decarbonisation plan. And I'll now hand back to Feimatta to lead the Q&A session.

Feimatta Conteh: Hello there, and hopefully Dan will be joining me as well as we go into this, and we'll have Beatie and Elizabeth in there. Thank you both so much for that great overview of the first two stages of a decarbonisation plan.

I was just sort of reflecting to myself of the importance of stage one of define, of what are you doing this for? Because I think so often you can leap straight through to the things that you're going to be doing, but I think that— I just wonder if there's something about— I can't quite form it into a question for myself of how do you define when is a good moment for an organisation to think about undertaking a decarbonisation plan? Maybe we could start with that question in there, and we'll see maybe if people have some questions to post in the chat below us. So when do you think is a good time for an organisation to think about commissioning a decarbonisation plan?

Beatie Blakemore: Shall I jump in? I mean, I think that, you know, it's a sort of document that really any kind of responsible building owner-operator ought to have as part of their kind of suite of decision-making tools that might also include maintenance plans, conservation management, etc. In practice, we know that buildings and organisations in the cultural and heritage sector in particular, are short of resources of many kinds, you know, funding, capital resources, staff time.

So, and I think what we're showing here in these webinars is that actually there's quite a big commitment required, both from the client team and indeed a consultant team coming in and sort of developing their understanding of the building and all its services and systems.

So in practice, what normally happens is that there'll be some pressure for change that drives the production of a plan like this. So it might be some of those kind of pressures or opportunities I mentioned earlier around overarching organisational goals, often it will be driven by perhaps a building that is not being maintained and looked after in the way that an organisation knows it should be, but doesn't quite have the resources to do so, and perhaps is looking to seek external funding to help them move forward with a series of either maintenance or emergency maintenance or indeed long-term capital projects.

Ideally, it would be something that was undertaken as a matter of course, as part of responsible environmental stewardship, but in reality, it's going to be at that moment, that crunch moment, where external pressures and internal drivers coalesce to provide the momentum to gather together the resources internally and externally that help you put together the plan. I think as we've kind of focused on this session and a little bit in the last session, it's really, really important that the scope and level of detail within the plan is tailored appropriately to the organisation.

Next session, we're going to be talking in a bit more detail about the range of surveys and assessments that could be undertaken to support a plan, and they vary considerably in terms of level of detail, who might be needed to do them, and of course cost— how much it costs to undertake, you know, commission and undertake them. And the more surveys and assessments you do, the more accurate an understanding you have about how the building performs.

But on the other hand, we don't want to make this exercise prohibitively expensive and complex such that a small cultural organisation cannot even begin to start to undertake it. And so I think that's what today's discussion is around. It's about trying to tailor the scope in a way that makes it accessible to these organisations, useful to them, and, you know, a productive sort of step in the long-term decarbonization. And I think that the guidance that we've developed is very much intended to be kind of scalable in that way so that it can be tailored to different organisation types.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, I'm going to ask Dan a question and then lead into this because I'm afraid it's kind of gone out my head, and Rita has a really great point about things being scalable. And Dan, am I right in thinking that in the case studies that will be on the website shortly, it will include all of the technical information of the surveys and things that were done in the three buildings? So that anybody looking at those could see kind of what information comes through from different kinds of surveys, and so then can assess whether it might be suitable for their building.

Dan Miles: Yeah, they will be, yes, definitely. And we'll cover that, I think it's next week, isn't it?

Feimatta Conteh: Yes, yes, moving into there.

Dan Miles: I just wanted to pick up that point. There is a question here, and I'll come to that one in a second. Just to pick up on what what you were saying, Feynman, and what B2 was saying is that I know that a lot of the museums and heritage organisations have been undertaking carbon literacy training. They've also been looking at doing, getting carbon reduction plans. So it's about sort of understanding organisations' emissions and then thinking about how they can reduce those emissions. And you could look at this classified under scope 1, scope 2, scope 3. I mean, I presume that this— the sort of the main idea of this is it actually fits in as part of an organisation's carbon reduction plan to actually focus on the building if they are a heritage attraction or a museum or a theatre, in terms of that's probably going to be the largest amount of carbon emissions that organisation may have. Does that sound about right, Beatie?

Beatie Blakemore: Yes, it will be a very significant— well, depending on the organisation and the organisation's activities locally or globally, it will form a, you know, I think a varying proportion of the overall carbon impact. But I think what is important is that particularly when we're dealing with historic buildings, it's one of the most complex areas to try to reduce, and I think that that the whole of this piece of work is grounded in what we talked about last week, the Historic England whole building approach, which is really about making sure that energy efficiency and retrofit measures to historic and existing buildings in particular need to be really carefully considered as part of a kind of holistic understanding of the history, the significance, the construction methods, the specific conditions of a particular organisation.

So, again, we're going to talk about this in the future webinars, but it might be worth just touching on this now. So, primarily, what a decarbonisation plan is intending to tease out are the opportunities for mitigation and adaptation measures. So by mitigation, we mean the changes that you might make to a building or its systems to reduce its climatic impact, so reduce its energy consumption and carbon emissions.

And then adaptation measures are about adapting the building to improve its future resilience to the changing climate, so increased rainfall and wetter winters, hotter, drier summers. Etc. But traditionally in the building industry, we've often talked about a so-called fabric-first approach, where the first thing you try and do in the design of new buildings is to design a really, really efficient thermal envelope, so highly insulated building, which doesn't need less energy to heat it and hopefully stays passively cool in summer, and then to start to look at kind of energy efficiency measures and service systems and renewable technologies after that.

But what Historic England are rightly advocating is that actually, when you're dealing with historic buildings, you need to take a much more nuanced approach to how you prioritise the measures. And the structure of the decarbonisation plan enables that more careful assessment and weighing up of potential interventions rooted in a really, really good understanding of the specific circumstances and characteristics of a building.

Feimatta Conteh: Thank you!

Dan Miles: I was going to say, if you could look at the questions, because I haven't got my glasses on.

Feimatta Conteh: The question actually, the first question that's asked in there is something that I always I was thinking, it was just like, are there minimum amounts of information required, i.e., do you need all of the documents that were listed, that you were listing there, I think it was on a slide that Elizabeth was having, or is there benefit in progressing with the basic level of information?

It's like, what my question as I had in my head is like, is there one bit of information that is fundamental to developing a decarbonisation plan, and I guess what would be the impact of kind of developing a plan with sort minimal information rather than everything that you could possibly have, because sometimes records management isn't as up to date as it could be.

Beatie Blakemore: Yeah, I think that building plans, so understanding the size and the arrangement of your building, is going to be critical to any kind of assessment of building performance alongside energy bills. So some level of understanding information on how much energy your building is using alongside how big your building is, is the sort of absolute critical first step on in terms of energy assessments.

I think some of the other information that is really important to that holistic understanding that we keep talking about, so heritage assessments, you know, understanding the history and the development of the site, that can be undertaken and investigated and researched by your incoming professional team if you don't have it available. So, you know, as part of the case studies that we developed, we did our own heritage assessments of each of the three buildings, in each case using previous research that had been undertaken where it was available.

So if there was a conservation management plan, that was obviously heavily informing our assessment of significance for that building. But it is, if you're employing a, or commissioning a conservation architect part of the team, then perhaps that high-level assessment of heritage significance forms part of the decolonisation plan itself.

Elizabeth Flower: It does also link back to the fact that any gaps in your information also then indicate where additional consultants may be required. So, for example, if you didn't have sufficient heritage information in place, you'd want to make sure that you appointed an architect or heritage specialist who could produce that through their research, rather than an architect who perhaps doesn't have that level of experience.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, Dan, I'm reminded of when we had our session at the Association of Independent Museums last summer, and we were talking about, you know, kind of in the room, the importance of record keeping and filing and making sure that you can access all of those things. So yeah, I'll go back to some of the questions that that are in the chat here. Forgive me, it's not my area of expertise, but churches always seem to come up as a thing in here.

And there's a question about, without any prior knowledge of what decarbonisation solutions might be required, how does one know which surveys might be necessary? All costs for churches are prohibitive. I understand that, you know, we'll be going into surveys in more detail in next week, so it's almost like, call or come back next week when we'll go into more detail. But is there anything you'd like to say just now in relation to that?

Beatie Blakemore: I mean, I think that condition surveys are probably the absolute critical first step. You know, if you have one that's been carried out within the last 5 years, that may well provide enough background information to sort of provide the basis of the decarbonisation plan. I think someone said somewhere else in the chat that although, you know, quinquennial surveys are meant to be sort of common practice for churches, often because of limited funds, they're not necessarily carried out on that 5-yearly cycle.

But yeah, I would say that's probably the first and most crucial. If you're in a position as a client where you have limited funds, you have some information but not all, and you're not quite sure who— what kind of surveys you need and what kind of consultants you need, you might need to support that. I would say that it is a— as Elizabeth mentioned, it is a conversation to have with that consultant team.

So we have provided the template and the guidance about what ideally you would have to hand in terms of information and what ideally you would seek to commission or procure as part of the decarbonisation plan. But as with any kind of project involving professional consultants in the built environment, there's always scope for discussion and review and negotiation with that incoming team who have a lot of knowledge about what's appropriate for your particular circumstances and building. So I would encourage you to be kind of, you know, open with those particular consultants and sort of negotiate with them about what, what you might need for your particular building and circumstances.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, and I've seen a couple of things coming up in the chat in here, and I know, BT, you Elizabeth here, you are our experts, but Dan, I think it really speaks to what we, you know, what are some of the fundamental principles we had in this project. Somebody's commented, is thinking about what could be done internally to support consultants to help save costs, isn't it? So it's about what information can client teams gather so that then they don't have to be paying out the consultants to be generating that information for them.

And then Dan, I think this is a question for sort of us. The material on the Historic England website goes through what goes into a good brief to ensure a heritage organisation gets the decarbonisation plan that provides the right depth of information. Also, the language of decarbonisation so that small voluntary-led groups can understand what's presented back to them. I think, Dan, the phrase that we've had through this project is helping people to become— what was it you called it? Confident clients.

Dan Miles: Confident clients, yeah.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, and I guess the role that we, you and I, played within this project, you know, which BT and Elizabeth and the consultant team were very generous with us in terms of explaining some of the technical language and some of those things so that we can pass that information on to the organisations that we support. So I don't know, Beatie or Elizabeth, if you've got any thoughts or comments you want to add into that.

Elizabeth Flower: I suppose the decolonisation plan template that we produced in itself is a kind of starting point for a brief for a decarbonisation plan. You could hand that template to a consultant and use it as a guide on what they should be producing with the scope kind of tailored appropriately according to the size of your organisation. And then specifically on the language, so as part of the guidance we produced a series of fact sheets, one of which is a glossary And that contains a full list of many different terms that came up through the process of producing the template and the case studies to put these quite complex things into layperson kind of language that can hopefully, alongside the guides and the case studies, help them be interpreted in a more clear way.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, that's a really great thing to flag, Elizabeth. All of the things that are on the website, they're kind of broken down. And there's a question in there: is there a template where organisations can gather data? I don't know if we had a template for that, but it definitely— on the website there's a list of all the different kinds of— there's a checklist, that's it.

So it's not a template, but it's a checklist of, you know, you know, Beatie and Elizabeth were talking before about kind of drawings, who might have those. Where they might find them, are they essential for a decarbonisation plan or not. So I might look at the website and see if we can— I'll post links to that in the chat. And just while I'm doing that, there's a comment here from— on the theme of churches, that they often opt for underfloor heating without going through the steps, and when the church is only used occasionally, it would be great to liaise with church establishments about this initiative. And I know, I think it probably will be not the next webinar, but the webinar after when we'll be talking about doing that sort of analysis of the cost-benefit of different interactions. So that's a useful thing to know. So as you work sequentially through a decarbonisation plan, working out what's the most appropriate intervention to carry out. So, something in there, I'm just scanning to see if there's anything else, or Dan, is there any questions that you've got in mind to ask?

Dan Miles: Just to say that we are talking to, certainly for the Church of England in terms of their net zero and how they're supporting churches with this, and that we've been talking about the decarbonation plan and everything as well. So just looking at that comment.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, so we've got probably about, I'd say, 5, 6, or 7 minutes or so left for questions that people might have. If you want to post them, post them in there. Dan, you had a question about building use. I know Elizabeth—

Dan Miles: Yeah.

Feimatta Conteh: In a couple of slides that you had. I don't know if you want to ask that through now.

Dan Miles: It was just thinking about the 3 case studies that we had is when we talked about building use, we talked about current building use, visitors, staff, amount of hours, and etc. But actually, I think all 3 organisations were thinking about potentially diversifying their income generation, so they were thinking about changing the use, maybe having sort of groups coming in, or having concerts, or meals, or events. So, are you able to sort of build in future use into sort of this sort of plan, or these processes?

Beatie Blakemore: Yes, I mean, that's a really important part of understanding the context and the drivers for why the decolonisation plan is being undertaken in the first place. So, you know, one of the things I always say is that, you know, however efficient your fabric is, a building is inherently inefficient if it's being underused. So, you know, we always want to be looking to intensify up to an appropriate point how much a building is being used and the diversity of that use.

And that's particularly important for financial resilience as well in terms of these kinds of organisations. So that's a really important part of sort of setting the scene and gathering the background information, understanding these contexts and drivers. It also becomes very important towards the end of the process when you're looking at prioritising the different measures.

So for those of you who might have commissioned or been involved with a maintenance plan, for example, often a, you know, a condition survey with maintenance plan may prioritise interventions according to their urgency or the level of deterioration of a particular bit of fabric, but often maintenance plans or certainly condition surveys don't necessarily group potential repair works into connected pieces of work, right?

And that's one of the limitations of certain, you know, certain formats of condition surveys. When you're starting to look at capital works, you may be starting to think about how interventions into a building might be phased as groups of interventions to align with either your strategic goals or perhaps the level of operational impact and logistical constraints associated with certain works.

And interestingly, through the case studies, and certainly this is our experience of undertaking architectural projects generally is that whatever your options appraisal tells you about which interventions, energy efficiency interventions, might deliver the biggest sort of carbon reduction savings, what's most likely is that how you prioritise those interventions will be much more closely related to funding availability, integration with potential capital projects, so some of those those bigger kind of very, very specific organisational goals that are underpinning this whole piece of work.

And what we'll talk about in the next webinar is the different ways in which we assess and weigh up the potential interventions that consider heritage constraints, cost, energy-saving opportunities, logistical issues, as well as those kind of wider ambitions for, you know, improving the accessibility and operation of the building as a whole.

Dan Miles: And, Beatie, I'll just say that you mentioned about sort of the heritage side. I think one of the points at the bottom here is it says, isn't the key document statement of significance of any recommendations considering the constraints Is that, you know, that's where that— where does that fit in and what do you think?

Beatie Blakemore: Yeah, very much so. So as we said before, you know, ideally if you have a conservation management plan or a statement of significance already, that's great, that's a piece of work done. If you haven't and you're working in a listed building, then an assessment of significance is going to be a really important part of the decolonisation plan itself because sort of potential harm to significance, but will be one of the key considerations when you're weighing up options. Yes. So yes, it is really, really important, and therefore it's important that you have that skill set within your team, you know, whether it's conservation architects or, as Elizabeth said, an architect who has extensive experience of working in listed contexts to properly assess the value and significance of the building and individual components within it. That is very important.

Feimatta Conteh: Thank you so much for reading that question and answering things. I think it kind of goes back to the thing of like, I didn't know what a statement of significance was, but that's about buildings that are being listed and all of those. So it is, you know, part of this project has been about understanding some of that language. And just to flag that of the 3 organizations that were involved in this project, we made listed status be one of the criteria that we selected them for, so that we know that the guidance we were developing in that.

So yeah, no, statement of significance, that's an important thing. I've just got, I guess, a slightly childish or maybe— it's not a cheeky question, so— but, you know, in terms of assembling the client team, it was one of the slides that was early in the presentation. Depending on the organisation and who they're made up of.

But the question is, is there a minimum number of people who needs to be in a client team? And without putting you on the spot, and I absolutely understand if you feel uncomfortable answering this, have you got any reflections on what makes a successful or unsuccessful client team from your experience?

Elizabeth Flower: I'm not sure it's so much to do with the number of people as opposed to the right people who have the right knowledge of the building. I suppose where kind of client relationships don't work so well is where the people who do have the detailed day-to-day in-depth knowledge of the building are kind of kept more at arm's length, and the interaction between them and the design team is kind of separate.

So yeah, I wouldn't say there's necessarily a minimum or even a maximum number in the client team. You know, briefing workshops and the way we work with teams can be kind of tailored accordingly to who's there. The most important thing is having the right people in the room.

Beatie Blakemore: Yeah, and I think also having a diversity of opinion and level of expertise is actually really helpful. And I think even in a small organisation, you will have different staff members with different levels of understanding of how the building works, and a kind of varying level of technical knowledge. But getting all of those different voices in the room is very helpful and important to creating a robust plan. That's brilliant, thank you.

Feimatta Conteh: Yeah, it's about people who have the knowledge of the building and the operation of it. Can actually have the best contribution to it. I've just been flagged that actually that's our last question for today, so apologies if anyone had a burning question you've not been able to ask.