Credit strategy in a BREEAM pre-assessment

A BREEAM pre-assessment is an estimate of the weighted score a scheme can reach, credit by credit, produced before the design is fixed. The credit strategy is the part that matters at planning stage: which credits you are targeting, which ones you are leaving alone, and which ones the planning decision itself will make possible or impossible. Get that wrong and you commit the scheme, through a condition, to a rating the design cannot deliver.

Ratings are scored as a weighted percentage. Pass sits at 30 per cent, Good at 45, Very Good at 55, Excellent at 70 and Outstanding at 85, with innovation credits capable of adding up to ten further percentage points. Below 30 per cent the building is unclassified, which in condition terms means a breach.

What the pre-assessment commits the scheme to

A pre-assessment is not a certificate. It is an assessor's view of what is achievable on the information available, and BRE certifies nothing at that stage. What makes it binding is the planning condition that follows, which typically requires a design-stage certificate before development starts and a post-construction certificate before occupation.

Read the condition wording carefully before you agree the target. A condition requiring a rating of "Excellent" is a different commitment from one requiring the scheme to "achieve the rating set out in the submitted pre-assessment". The second is easier to live with, because it is anchored to a document rather than to a number, and it gives you room to argue about the version of the scheme that applies.

Councils routinely expect the author to hold a current licence, and only a licensed assessor can register and certify an assessment with BRE. A BREEAM Pre-Assessment is a report type where professional review is strongly advised for that reason: an unlicensed estimate can be perfectly sensible and still be unusable as the basis for certification.

Choosing the target rating

Work backwards from the local plan policy, then sanity check against the site.

Many adopted plans and London borough policies require Excellent for non-residential development of a certain floorspace, with Outstanding sought for larger or exemplar schemes. The policy wording is the floor. Going above it voluntarily is a decision to hand the planning authority a condition you will then have to satisfy, so do it only where the credits are within reach.

The site constraints do most of the work. A scheme with poor public transport accessibility loses transport credits it cannot buy back. A tight urban plot with no room for habitat creation loses land use and ecology credits. A brownfield site with contamination already dealt with may pick up credits a greenfield site cannot. Those three factors together often explain a ten-point spread between two otherwise identical buildings.

Minimum standards at each rating

The weighted percentage is only half the test. Each rating level carries minimum standards: named credits that must be achieved regardless of how high the overall score climbs. Miss one and the rating drops to the level whose minimum standards you do satisfy, even with a score well above the threshold.

The number of minimum standards increases sharply at Excellent and again at Outstanding, and they cluster in management, energy, water, materials and waste. Check the minimum standards table in the version of the scheme under which the assessment will be registered, because BRE updates the technical manual and the table changes between versions.

This is where a pre-assessment goes wrong most often. A tracker showing 71 per cent looks comfortable until you notice one unachieved minimum standard, at which point the certificate reads Very Good and the condition is unmet.

Credits that depend on planning decisions

Some credits are decided by the planning application rather than by the contractor, which is why the credit strategy belongs in the design team's hands early.

The overlap with the rest of the application pack is almost total. The lighting layout that earns the pollution credit is the same layout assessed in your obtrusive light work, so the environmental zone assigned to the site governs both. The waste credits depend on the same bin store, capacity and collection arrangements set out in the storage and collection section of the waste strategy. Where an Energy Statement sets out a fabric-first approach and a heat pump, the energy credits follow from it.

Coordinate once and you gain credits for free. Coordinate late and you find the consented layout has quietly closed off four of them.

Credits at risk and where the contingency sits

Split the tracker into three columns rather than two. Targeted credits are those the design already delivers. Potential credits are those a later decision could deliver. Not targeted means exactly that, and saying so plainly is better than carrying optimistic entries that collapse at design stage.

The credits most often lost between pre-assessment and certification are the ones that depend on somebody else's future behaviour:

• responsible construction practices and site management credits, which rely on the contractor signing up to a scheme and reporting properly
• aftercare and seasonal commissioning credits, which need a commitment the developer may not hold if the asset is sold
• tenant-dependent credits in shell and core buildings, where the fit-out is outside your control
• credits relying on a specific product that turns out to have a 40-week lead time

Carry five to eight percentage points of headroom above the threshold. On a scheme targeting Excellent that means designing for the high seventies, which sounds cautious until the first value-engineering exercise removes two credits in an afternoon.

Recording the tracker for the condition

The document the planning authority receives should show, for each credit: the credits available, the credits targeted, the evidence route, who is responsible for producing that evidence, and the design decision it depends on. A percentage with no audit trail is worthless to a case officer and worse than useless to the design-stage assessor a year later.

Illustrative example: a four-storey office of 3,200 m² targeting Excellent registers a pre-assessment at 74 per cent. The tracker names the two transport credits as dependent on the cycle store shown on the consented site plan, and the surface water credit as dependent on a 2 litres per second discharge rate agreed with the lead local flood authority. When the ground floor layout later changes, the assessor can see in one line which credits the change puts at risk.

Keep the tracker live. It is the same discipline as a design risk register, and it is the only thing that lets you answer the discharge-of-conditions request without reconstructing two years of decisions.

What happens if the rating is missed

Nothing automatic, and that is the problem. A post-construction certificate below the required rating is a breach of condition, and the council's options run through informal negotiation, a breach of condition notice and, in the worst case, enforcement.

The practical routes are to apply under section 73 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to vary the condition, supported by evidence of what changed and why, or to discharge the condition with a written justification and the certificate you did achieve. Neither is comfortable, and both depend on having the audit trail that shows the shortfall came from a documented constraint rather than from a target nobody ever intended to hit.

Better to set a target you can defend. If the honest answer at planning stage is Very Good, say Very Good and explain the site constraints in the sustainability statement rather than promising Excellent and hoping.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.