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Inbuilt prison project wins prestigious BREEAM award

Sustainability consultancy Inbuilt is celebrating the success of its award-winning project at HMP Littlehey Young Offenders Institute. The development of two new 120-cell accommodation blocks at the prison were the focus of a prestigious BREEAM Award, given to recognise those involved in the design and construction of the highest scoring buildings certified under the BREEAM environmental rating scheme. Inbuilt was the BREEAM Assessor for the site.

Built by Wates Construction Ltd as part of its prison framework with the Ministry of Justice, the project had a construction value of £62million and was completed in January this year.

Houseblocks K and L achieved a BREEAM 'Excellent' rating with a score of 76.23%. To gain an 'Excellent' rating developments must earn most of the performance credits available in the areas of energy, materials, waste, ecology, pollution, transport, management, and health and wellbeing.

In fact, Inbuilt assisted the design team in delivering BREEAM Excellent for 12 buildings on the site including four house blocks, a sports hall, kitchen, administration building, education and multi-faith facilities, segregation unit, visitors centre, reception, healthcare facilities and workshops.

Among the new buildings' many environmental attributes are a district biomass heating system which provides more than 30% of annual heating, modular construction with outstanding thermal performance, integrated high performance M&E design and rainwater recycling.

Malcolm Mitton, Construction Manager at Wates, said, "We were tasked to deliver a fully working prison within 43 weeks with preconstruction activity of 12 weeks for design, a challenge on any site aside from being required to meet the MoJ expectation of BREEAM 'Very Good'.

"Dealing with Inbuilt and its specialist team has been a delight; they worked tirelessly to gather the information together from our designers and suppliers. They would review and recommend design changes where necessary, and constantly reappraised the facts they were presented with until we were able to exceed expectation and ultimately acheive a BREEAM Excellent for the project. Without Inbuilt's remarkable effort we would not have achieved this result."
 
BREEAM Award winners truly represent the top examples of sustainable design. The awards are not subjective as each development has been independently assessed and certified. In order to win an award, each building must have excelled in every environmental category within BREEAM, from energy to ecology), and therefore winners represent a holistic approach to delivering environmental sustainability.

Click here to download further information on the project or click here to take a look at Inbuilt's client case studies.