COMMENT Covid-19 is an acute demonstration of an air quality crisis that has been quietly brewing in our workplaces. Although many companies say they recognise the importance of indoor air quality, most business owners feel they lack sufficient information to improve it.
The ongoing threat from airborne viruses is already bringing about market and regulatory pressure that will rebalance this knowledge gap, but there’s a significant opportunity in getting ahead of the expectations of both.
As we return to work following what we hope will be the successful suppression of Covid, we face the real possibility that a large amount of office space will be rendered obsolete. Grant Thornton’s latest International Business Report found that 39% of mid-sized companies in the UK expect to reduce the amount of office space they hold, with 74% of that group anticipating cutting their existing footprint by up to a quarter and 12% by up to a half.
In the worst-case scenario, a clear divide will emerge: space that meets newly stringent occupier expectations will be in high demand, while space that falls short may see its value plummet, as high volumes of second-hand space come onto the market.
Chronic issue
Measures to mitigate a future pandemic have dominated headlines about the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s consultation on building regulations governing ventilation as part of the Future Buildings Standard.
Although FBS is sweeping and affects many aspects of building, the consultation makes specific reference to increasing ventilation to mitigate future pandemics, introducing a guideline ventilation rate of 15 litres per second per person and requiring air quality monitoring equipment to be installed in most office spaces.
Air quality is a chronic issue throughout the industrial world. In the UK, more than 80% of outdoor air monitoring sites record levels of PM2.5 particles above the World Health Organisation’s annual guideline limit, and the current UK limit is more than double that recommended by the WHO.
We like to think of our buildings as safe havens, but in truth indoor spaces are frequently much more polluted than we realise, with concentrations of some pollutants often two to five times higher than typical outdoor concentrations.
Airborne viruses can concentrate in poorly ventilated spaces just as pollutants do, and with every additional person in a space being a potential source of infection, a poorly ventilated building presents an unacceptable risk in a pandemic situation.
Employers and employees cared about indoor air before Covid, but AirRated’s own research has discovered that 62% of business owners feel they don’t have access to enough information to take action on the air quality within their buildings. Some 57% of respondents in the same research said their awareness of indoor air quality increased in 2020.
Indoor generation
Perhaps the most striking finding of our survey was that more than half of people said they would consider not working for a company if they couldn’t prove the quality of their indoor air.
A recent survey by the Building Engineering Services Association found that almost 70% of office workers believe poor air quality has a negative impact on their day-to-day productivity. In office-based businesses, where competition for the most knowledgeable and skilled employees is intense, air quality is a core component of an increased awareness of wellbeing that could present an existential threat to companies that don’t take their workplace environment seriously.
The trappings of modern life mean that we spend more than 90% of our time indoors, making us what many are calling “the indoor generation”. At plenty of moments during 2020, 90% has felt like an underestimate. When we return to normal life, we’re told that many things will never be the same again – the air we breathe, especially indoors, should be near the top of that list.
Francesca Brady is chief executive of AirRated
