星空传媒

He said the industry did not at present have the capability to comply with Part L of the building regulations, which seeks to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.

David Cafferty, director at HLM Architects, said QSs and PMs should get involved in projects from as early as the design stage to make whole life cost assessments. "The problem is that QSs and PMs are valiantly trying to catch up with the process, but they are not in charge of the process."

He said it was "difficult to grasp" the costs of forward investment in sustainable solutions and added that many such solutions were expensive upfront, such as photovoltaics.

He added: "QSs need to develop cost evaluation tools and look at the holistic benefits of saving energy. I recently interviewed a firm of QSs and they were quite clear on what they needed to achieve but they were not quite there yet."

Cafferty said it was also down to the rest of the project team to focus more on sustainability. "QSs and PMs need to understand the benefits of a particular innovation. But equally, if architects don't publicise the benefits of innovations to the rest of the team then there's no hope. It's about sharing information."

HLM has developed an IT-based tool that allows designers to calculate how sustainable a building is while it is still on the drawing board. The system, HLM-4D, can do what would take two to three weeks if done manually in two to three minutes, Cafferty claimed.

He said 星空传媒 Research Establishment has asked HLM to take the tool to the rest of the industry but "we are not sure if we want to, it's an edge we have over the rest of the industry".