Our May conference this year focused on those three stark letters E, S and G - and what they mean to PTE. Our introduction was a five-act affair, with each speaker providing a unique take on Environmental, Social and Governance.

History

Partner Patrick Devlin’s deep dive into ESG origins linked ESG today with William Lever's Port Sunlight soap factory (1888) – its village green and idealised worker homes - and the Quaker industrialists (Cadbury and Rowntree, for example) who built model villages by their factories. Their focus, Patrick explained, was both people and profit – an aspiration challenged and often overturned in the 1970s by Milton Friedman’s doctrine “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits”. By the ‘00s though, new research was showing that that ‘good’ employers – those who prioritised people and purpose - outperformed solely profit-focused firms in the long term, fortifying, Patrick said, market support for the increasingly ESG-led economy of today.

Environmental design

Office manager Bobby Sharpe explained the E of ESG with an overview of PTE’s progress as a signatory, since 2022, of the London Mayor's Business Climate Challenge (BCC) which guides companies to drive down energy usage. We learned that we’ve reduced photocopies from 650K in 2019, to just 50K in 2022 and while our waste totalled 15 tonnes in 2019, it was only seven last year. We still produce 116 tonnes of CO2 a year however – but that’s 90 per cent lower than the average London business.

Sustainability design specialist Grecia Castillo focused on our sustainability ‘vision’ to go beyond minimum performance and how we do that with in-house tools, like our bespoke sustainability and retrofit toolkits; through our commitment to ISO 140001 certification; and to various climate action marques and organisations including AJ’s Retrofirst campaign, the RIBA climate challenge and Architects Declare.

Social value in the workplace

Bid manager Catherine Purves highlighted that social value typically accounts for 10 per cent of scoring in many bids, with clients eager to achieve social value in their projects. She also explained PTE’s history of best practice social value in the workplace - via our office lunches, social and sports groups, heath and wellbeing courses not forgetting her forthcoming bug hotel biodiversity workshop in the garden, after Thursday lunch.

Researching ESG

Gloria Vargas Palma rounded off the introductions with a preview of her upcoming ‘Happy Homes’ workshop, which asks: ‘where does social value happen in housing?’ This is an important part of the current KTP with Reading University investigating the measurement of social value embedded in design.

As our Research Associate at PTE, and the University of Reading supported by the Knowledge Transfer Partnership, Gloria introduced the next workshop tasking the whole office with exploring how social value can be incorporated and evidenced in our buildings and places at the design stage. Social qualities are captured in six terms, including ’wonder’ and ‘belonging’. Colleagues formed small teams, each looking at and discussing a current PTE project, labelling plans to identify archetypes - ‘spaces, elements and details’ – where social value can happen in domestic settings.

One team noted on a maisonette plan: ‘oversize bedrooms (for double beds) to allow older children to remain living at home longer’, while a sculptural villa roof was highlighted for its ‘unique design’ and how this ‘fosters a sense of belonging’. Another team advised a ‘common architectural language to provide coherence across the estate’ on another scheme. The teams moved onto the next project, adding to and sometimes challenging the archetypes applied by previous groups.

Colleagues questioned ‘how you feel and move in your home and in the street’ and how this affects our wellbeing, pitted open-plan designs against cellular plans, while pretty much everyone questioned the ubiquity of floor to ceiling windows.

Guest speaker and social value expert Flora Samuel of Cambridge University chipped in to cite the work of The Quality of Life Foundation - set up by architect Sadie Morgan - and its role influencing RIBA’s social value toolkit and the wider profession’s ESG outlook.