There is not enough investment put into FMs at a level appropriate to the complexity of the building and systems they manage, says a report to be published this week.
How Much Energy Does Your Building Use, published by the non-profit National Energy Foundation (NEF), states that this oversight goes on to hinder the energy performance of buildings.
The report's authors say energy is integral to a building, not a separate 'sustainability' issue. And when it came to making buildings more energy efficient, FMs were the ones with ;the hardest jobs'.
FMs were 'quite often given a building to manage with limited resources and an introduction to the building fabric, services and control systems that lasts an hour if they're lucky", says the report.
It adds that FMs were likely to have many other responsibilities too, which limited the time they could spend on remedying any particular difficulties.
One problem they may face in trying to control and improve the energy performance of a building is having 'air-conditioning and heating systems... running in competition with one another, with on one noticing", says the report.
Alongside the book, an online knowledge exchange has also been launched to help combat the UK's persistent failure to produce non-domestic buildings that combine both comfort and excellent energy performance. This is a situation that some regard as a 'national scandal' says the report.
Liz Reason, managing director of the Green Gauge Trust, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to mainstream the knowledge and skills for low-energy, low-carbon buildings and author of the report, said: "Designing and building low-energy buildings is not difficult; it just needs some basic building physics and a clear, common language for talking meaningfully about energy performance with all those in the building cycle."
Dr Kerry Mashford, chief executive of NEF, said, "Both the e-book and the online facility take a practical approach and provide a valuable contribution to closing the gap between the expected and actual energy performance in the built environment."
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