A second meeting of the West Midlands Sustainable Built Environment Forum was held on 14^th April 2010 which was well attended, by invitation only.

The Forum’s work and progress made were reviewed, and the importance of Low Carbon Construction IGT was recognised as one of the most important current policy indicators in response to the Climate Change Act.

Since the first meeting in January, the following had been progressed:

• Development of a database/map of sustainable buildings in the Midlands which included BREEAM rated projects , which is fully accessible on the web from the WMCCE website (see http://www.wmcce.org/wm_sust_be_forum), work undertaken by Encraft .
• ‘Finance for Retrofit’ project for Sustainability West Midlands, undertaken by Encraft, who reported that they were in the process of engaging with Santander, Cooperative Bank and various Asian /Islamic banks who have shown great interest.
• Development of a BREEAM Refurbishment standard for schools has been started by BRE.
• Completion of the first stage report on the Climate Change for Schools project has now been completed.

Thought provoking presentations were made by Carillion on how their company operates sustainably as a whole and WSP Partnership gave a fascinating insight into sustainable construction on what works and what doesn’t work.

WMCCE are developing the forum further to take account of members’ needs. Some of the ideas include research and investigation, monitoring of policy and the development of case studies. A sub-website is being planned, attached to the WMCCE main website.