The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is a centre of building science in the United Kingdom, owned by charitable organisation the BRE Trust. It is a former

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national laboratory that was privatised in 1997. BRE provides research, advice, training, testing, certification and standards for both

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichk ...

and

private sector The private sector is the part of the economy, sometimes referred to as the citizen sector, which is owned by private groups, usually as a means of establishment for profit or non profit, rather than being owned by the government. Employment The ...

organisations in the UK and abroad. It has its headquarters in Garston, Hertfordshire, England, with regional sites in

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated pop ...

, Swansea, the US, India, the Middle East and China.

Programmes

BRE is now funded with income from commissioned research, commercial programmes and by a number of digital tools for use in the construction sector. BRE's certification arm – BRE Global – is an independent, third-party certification body responsible for sustainability certification schemes such as BREEAM (for buildings and communities), CEEQUAL (for infrastructure), the Home Quality Mark (for housing) and LPCB certification (for fire and security products and services). BRE's training arm, the BRE Academy provides online and classroom courses on built environment related issues like sustainability, fire, resilience and building information modelling (BIM). BRE also carries out research and data generation in support of national and international standards and

building code A building code (also building control or building regulations) is a set of rules that specify the standards for constructed objects such as buildings and non-building structures. Buildings must conform to the code to obtain planning permiss ...

s, including the UK building regulations. It also develops its own standards for responsible sourcing (BES 6001), and ethical labour sourcing (BES 6002). BRE's digital tools include

construction waste Construction waste or debris is any kind of debris from the construction process. Different government agencies have clear definitions. For example, the United States Environmental Protection Agency EPA defines construction and demolition materi ...

management tool SMARTWaste and construction health, safety and wellbeing tool YellowJacket. It also has UKAS accredited testing laboratories, and a publishing business in partnership with IHS Press called the BRE Bookshop.

Ownership

The Building Research Establishment is owned by the BRE Trust, a registered charity that works to support research and education in the built environment. All of the profits accrued by BRE are passed to the Trust and are used to fund new research and education programmes designed to meet the Trust's goal of promoting safety and

sustainability Specific definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on and have varied in the literature and over time. The concept of sustainability can be used to guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels (e.g. sustainable livin ...

. Over the last 20 years the BRE Trust has funded 117 PhDs on a total research programme of £15m, with other funding levered into the sector as a whole from research councils and

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been ...

research sources. The BRE Trust also financially supports five university Centres of Excellence. One of the first Centres established was at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

in 2004, a research and education programme on fire safety engineering. The other centres are in Strathclyde (energy utilisation),

Bath Bath may refer to: * Bathing, immersion in a fluid ** Bathtub, a large open container for water, in which a person may wash their body ** Public bathing, a public place where people bathe * Thermae, ancient Roman public bathing facilities Plac ...

(construction materials),

Cardiff Cardiff (; cy, Caerdydd ) is the capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of Wales. It forms a Principal areas of Wales, principal area, officially known as the City and County of Cardiff ( cy, Dinas a ...

( sustainable engineering), and Brasilia (integrated and sustainable communities).

History

Operation Chastise (the Dambusters' Raid) 16 - 17 May 1943 C(AM)1603

BRE was founded in 1921 as the Building Research Board at East Acton as part of the British Civil Service, as an effort to improve the quality of

housing in the United Kingdom Housing in the United Kingdom represents the largest non-financial asset class in the UK; its overall net value passed the £5 trillion mark in 2014. About 30% of homes are owned outright by their occupants, and a further 40% are owner-occupied ...

. During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, it was involved in the confidential research and development of the bouncing bomb for use against the Möhne Dam in the Dambusters Raid of 1943 A small scale model of the dam used for testing can still be found at the Centre in Garston, Watford, today. BRE was a founding member in 1976 of BSRIA, the Building Services Research and Information Association and the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) in 2007. Having subsumed a number of other government organisations over the years, including the former Fire Research Station, and the Princes Risborough Laboratory, it was given executive agency status in 1990, before being privatised by the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions on 19 March 1997. From 1 January 2013, BRE took over the management of the UK and Ireland chapter of BuildingSMART. In August 2016, Constructing Excellence merged with BRE, with BRE undertaking to maintain the CE's brands and functions. Since the Grenfell Tower fire(2017), BRE has been criticised for holding poor fire safety standards, all the while via reviewing cases like that of Grenfell.

References

Bibliography

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External links