HIE Sustainable Construction conference, Drumossie Hotel, Inverness, 9 May 2007

Introduction

Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is hosting a one-day conference aimed at raising awareness of and capacity to achieve more environmentally considerate and sustainable delivery of not only HIE’s directly procured construction activity but building projects in the Highlands and Islands as a whole.

Background

The Highlands and Islands covers half of Scotland’s land mass, including 90 inhabited islands, yet is home to only 435,000 people, or 8.5 per cent of the Scottish population. This creates specific challenges for the area which are not present in the rest of Scotland.

A significant challenge, especially outside urban centres, is the failure of the market to provide for commercial property outside the inner Moray Firth.

HIE spends significant resources; 15-20 per cent of its annual budget, providing advance and bespoke industrial / commercial property and business park infrastructure in the area.

The opening of the new Scottish Natural Heritage headquarters in Inverness during 2006, demonstrated the manner in which greater emphasis on environmental and sustainability considerations can be factored into the design and construction of industrial and commercial property. There is a perception that the SNH building and subsequently the new Forestry Commission Scotland building at Smithton, moved significantly upwards the acceptable benchmark for public sector commercial property construction in the Highlands and Islands.

HIE wishes to increase the environmental and sustainability content and performance of its own construction programme. While HIE buildings have always been constructed to a high standard, the organisation is in the process of reviewing the design and specifications to be adopted in future projects.

HIE held this conference to raise awareness of environmental and sustainable building construction specifications and methods among not just HIE’s procurement framework supply partners, but also the area’s wider construction sector.

The event set the background to recent and future legislative or administrative changes which mean that all government procurement will more deeply embrace sustainable principles. The conference was therefore a business opportunity and attracted the main public and private property stakeholders. Speakers explored some of the practical challenges; the event was not just an academic exercise and stakeholders were given some suggestions as to how they might in practice deliver sustainability in the future.

Speaker presentations from the conference are available here to download (right). Please note, these have been converted from Powerpoint to Adobe pdf and may have lost some of the original formatting, animation and so on.

A short video report about the conference, from STV's North Tonight programme - copyright STV - is now available here in Windows Media (wmv) format.