Retrofit programmes for installing energy efficient technologies in social housing are a key part of efforts to reduce UK carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. This requires a reduction in CO2 emissions by an average of 80%, from all housing, in order to assist the UK’s long term goals. The UK’s turnover of housing stock is relatively slow compared to most developed countries and approximately 87% of the current housing stock will still be standing in 2050. Therefore, to meet carbon emissions targets, existing buildings must be refurbished or ‘retrofitted’ with technologies which reduce carbon emissions on a huge scale. The Government intends to achieve this by driving energy efficiency in households and businesses predominantly through the proposed Green Deal framework. This represents a shift in policy approach since the 2010 elections, towards a private finance and private industry approach, as rather than the previous Labour Governments predominately state managed and grant-aided social retrofit approach. The influence of the economic recession at the time of this transition is also likely to be a key driver of the Governments changing approach to financing the retrofit of millions of UK homes. Other strategies such as the UK Fuel Poverty Strategy are also intended to dove-tail with this national push to retrofit housing stock, due to reduced energy costs and increased thermal comfort. There is great potential for the proposed national retrofit mobilisation to reduce carbon emissions from homes, contribute to economic growth and provide other benefits such as the reduction of Fuel Poverty. However, the amount of energy used in homes is largely dependent on the behaviours of the occupier(s) and occupant behaviour can determine the effectiveness of retrofit programmes and thus impact on the potential of this significant mobilisation to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions from housing. Thus, occupant behaviour is increasingly recognised as a critical element to be acknowledged and addressed in order to meet carbon reduction targets, both within the literature (excluding the policy literature) by and those delivering retrofits on the ground. This research provides a unique insight into occupant energy use behaviour by evaluating a ‘live’ project to retrofit energy efficient being implemented by Gentoo Group which includes construction and social landlord roles. The literature review relevant to the research focuses on Psychological theories of behaviour and Practice Theory. This provides insights from both paradigms provide two viewpoints on behaviour: an insight into the nature of individual behaviour (Psychological theories of behaviour), and; a consideration of how the framework and structure of society (including aspects such as technology) interacts with the individual’s practices (Practice Theory). The research methodology utilised an inductive approach, underpinned by a qualitative research design. In-depth interviews were conducted before and after specific interventions (a technical intervention and informational interventions) took place, these interviews were recorded and transcriptions were thematically organised and analysed using the template analysis technique. This process first identified ‘patterns of behaviour related to energy use’ arising due the project interventions and secondly based on the frequency of these occurring, identified ‘key patterns’. The theoretical perspectives of the Psychology and Practice Theory literature were drawn on in order to contextualise the findings of the research, but it this thesis does not attempt to apply them in an empirical approach. The analysis process instead draws on specific elements from both of the disciplines to assist the interrogation of the ‘key patterns’ so they may be better explained or understood. Key findings of the research highlighted that energy use behaviour is impacted by the introduction of technology, and tenant behaviour can potentially impact on the energy saving effectiveness of retrofit projects. Significant impacts were identified specifically where tenants had an interaction with the technology being introduced and the informational intervention had no significant impact on behaviour. ‘Key patterns’ indicated several factors which influence tenant energy use behaviour and of these the barriers to retrofit effectiveness were identified as: limited access to knowledge and skills; habits preventing behaviour change to utilise introduced technologies; the quality of installation and function of the technical intervention; convenience of introduced technology potentially increasing energy use, and: the need or desire for thermal comfort. The thesis concludes that energy use behaviour is pivotal factor in determining retrofit effectiveness and that behaviour, and in particular behaviour-related barriers to retrofit effectiveness, should be acknowledged and addressed as part of the UK retrofit strategy, especially in the light emerging policies such as the Green Deal and Energy Company Obligation, which intend to drive retrofit on a huge scale. Recommendations are made inform retrofit practitioners and academic and policy debates on behaviour in the context social housing retrofit, and suggestions are made for future research to explore this research area further.

The United Kingdom is committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 as part of a strategy to mitigate climate change. As housing is responsible for approximately 26 percent of all UK carbon emissions, housing carbon reduction is a key component in meeting this target. Local Authorities are faced with the problem of how to improve the quality of existing housing stock, provide additional social housing to meet increasing demand, and cutting emissions from both new and existing housing stock. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is being used as a means to deliver new and refurbished social housing using private, rather than public capital, and is expected to enable the delivery of sustainable, rented homes. However there have been concerns about the use of the PFI model to deliver public sector housing which meet sustainability goals. The overall aim of this thesis is to examine whether the UK’s Public Finance Initiative (PFI) can achieve the procurement of sustainable social housing. In order to address this aim, the study considers the technical and contextual issues that affect sustainability in PFI housing projects, focussing specifically on one such project in the North East of England. With regard to the technical issues, the research introduces a methodological tool that has been developed to assess the sustainability of PFI housing projects. It is envisioned that the tool will be useful for assessing the sustainability of other housing projects procured under a public private partnership arrangement. The contextual issues are examined by means of an ethnographic study carried out from within North Tyneside Councils PFI procurement team over a period of 2 years. The results of the study suggest that the PFI procurement model can be used to deliver sustainable housing, but is currently hampered by a lack of skills, knowledge and understanding. These problems are particularly acute at the project management and governance level within the procuring local authority. The study identifies the need for clear guidance on incorporating sustainability into the procurement of PFI projects. It also recommends the use of appropriate tools to assess the sustainability of plans and build capacity within local authority procurement teams.

During the last few decades, strategic management and strategic human resource management theories have received a great deal of attention in many industrial sectors. The complex and constantly changing business environment has driven large construction companies more than ever before to reflect on the interplay between their organisational strategies and their strategic management processes, tools and techniques. This is despite the great value of human capital for an organisation’s strategic flexibility within different sets of environmental evolutions. This includes people in various positions, administrative, professional, managerial and unskilled, as well as numerous project stakeholders. Several researchers are increasingly interested in applying strategies and human-related studies within the construction industry; however, an integrated study of these two factors has been notably lacking, particularly in an airport context where the challenges and difficulties of managing construction projects are high. This doctoral thesis contributes to the existing literature by exploring the unique characteristics of an airport construction environment, along with reporting the findings of the impact that different airport ownership forms have on construction management efficiency. Through integrating numerous theories and concepts associated with project strategies, strategic human resource management and various efficiency management attributes, this research project presents a unique strategic framework that offers a structured approach to support airport holding bodies. Research primary data were collected following semi-structured interviews with senior construction project managers of airport operators within three distinct airport organisations in terms of their ownership structures. The resultant findings provide insight into the many differences between the case studies in term of project management practices. Furthermore, an explanation of the key practices that influence the occurrence of project success were identified. This doctoral investigation identified there is a need for flexibility and scalability aligned with adopting the strategic framework and engaging its conceptual application with actual management and controlling practices. In essence, the research framework was developed for each category of airport organisation, where an airport organisation is encouraged to focus its efforts on managing the most important framework components which are needed for effective improvement of management practices and, accordingly, to achieve expectations. The resulting theoretical framework provides a unique tool for airport operators to apply their project management knowledge effectively in order to realize complex projects and to secure potential efficiency gains. This study therefore provides a novel theoretical insight into the strategic management of human resources during airport construction projects. The primary application of the strategic framework is concerned with managing and controlling existing airport construction projects, particularly refurbishment or extension projects, however this could be also applied to new airport construction projects where the factors affecting strategic management and strategic human resource management anticipated to be different to those studied during this investigation. This has paved the way for future investigations to be conducted to tackle this dichotomy and further understand the intriguing aspects of airport construction business.

There has been little comprehensive investigation of secondary office vacancy in the UK, nor its potential management or amelioration. In response, this thesis is a study of the nature, scale and location of this situation and an appraisal of the various strategies for its management and amelioration. There are three strands of research. An investigation into the nature, scale and location of secondary commercial office vacancy in the UK. An appraisal of potential management strategies and the development of policy recommendations in relation to the potential amelioration of this situation. An appraisal of the literature was conducted to develop an initial theoretical interpretation of secondary office vacancy. A multi attribute database of commercial office vacancy was then developed to evidence the stock of secondary office vacancy in the UK. Finally, a Delphi exercise was conducted to understand the underlying conditions of this phenomenon, its management and potential amelioration. Findings indicate that secondary office vacancy is ambiguous and colloquial. Vacant secondary office property exists in abundance while prime office property is in short supply. The institutions of the commercial office market over simplify and potentially disguise its manifestation. The incidence of secondary office vacancy is primarily caused by a structural change in the nature of demand. It can be held in reserve to support prime office supply, however, it can also overhang less buoyant locations. Consequently, the management strategies for secondary office vacancy are stratified, ranging from exploitation, to demand repositioning, to renewal and finally removal and redevelopment. Findings suggest that these management strategies should be predicated upon the demonstration of economic viability and mediated by the relative era of construction and underlying institutional characteristics. Finally, policy recommendations suggest that the amelioration of secondary office vacancy would be assisted by the promotion of more agile ways of working based on functional tolerance, and optionality.

The aim of this research study is to understand the impacts of Building Information Modelling (BIM) on communication patterns of construction projects. This has been investigated through the identification of current communication patterns within the construction sector. A communication framework has been constructed which identifies a set of characteristics and defines benchmarks according to those patterns that can be managed during BIM implementation. This thesis has examined the issues surrounding the use of e-mail and BIM and addresses the potential that BIM has to increase electronic communication caused by traditional and disjointed working practices as well as lack of pre-defined communication protocols. This research finds that today the use of e-mail has become inevitable which promotes the exchange of documents as attachments. However, BIM is introducing new ways of working in which the industry is bound to move from a document-centric environment to a more data-driven environment utilising intelligent and data rich information models. The study continues to discuss that the integration of BIM as a collaboration platform is not as advanced as the industry sector perceives and proposes the necessity of a greater understanding of current communication practices, which can be addressed by the development of a conceptual framework of communication. This study has utilised a mixed method strategy with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and it was divided into two stages. The initial stage employed two research techniques; a pilot study and focus groups. This stage was largely exploratory and set out to understand and observe current trends with regards to construction communication and used an inductive reasoning to generate a hypothesis. The second stage of the study was explanatory to explain the impacts of BIM on communication patterns of construction projects using descriptive analysis as well as using deductive reasoning to achieve a clear demonstration and a validation of the hypothesis. During this stage electronic communication patterns and peoples‘ activities were critically evaluated via data mining techniques on a large dataset provided by a 4Projects, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company. Conclusions of the research highlight the potential for better understanding of the impacts of BIM on communication patterns though the development of a conceptual communication framework and the use of contextualised maturity models. This research has identified opposing views within the industry with regards to the impact of BIM on communication patterns within construction projects. These views are polarised into the belief at one extreme that BIM will lead to improved communication and at the other that BIM will lead to increased unmanaged and unreliable information exchanges during design and construction of projects. The results of this thesis also demonstrate a wide range of concerns around communication practices. These issues are due to the growth of the industry in relation to technology, organisation size, project complexity, cultural changes and innovation. Some of the key cultural barriers include; digital engineering capability and competency, cost-driven culture, shift from document and records management to data and information management, legal and commercial aspects of project contracts, collaborative frameworks, education, training and support and leadership in a digital construction which need to be resolved in order to obtain the most benefit from BIM as a collaboration platform.

In the construction industry, the relationship between clients and contractors has been usually characterized by uncertainty and adversarial behaviour. More recently, their relationship is said to be changing from a traditional and arms-length basis to more collaborative forms, e.g. partnering. There is evidence that such collaborative forms can have a substantial impact on project performance, not only with regard to time, cost and quality objectives, but also with regard to more general outcomes, e.g. greater innovation and improved user satisfaction. However, such benefits are less well understood due to limited research and in particular an absence of robust and appropriate methods of evaluation. The purpose of this research is to address this shortfall and seek to evaluate these wider aspects of project performance relative to different degrees of collaborative working. To achieve this, collaborative working and project performance first need to be transformed into a measurable form by breaking them down into a variety of attributes or indicators. Surrounding these attributes/indicators, item statements are developed and a Likert Scale is then adopted for questionnaire design. Questionnaires were mainly administered by semi-structured interviews in which the client and contractor from the same project were invited to evaluate their collaborative working and the corresponding project performance. After unidimensionality and reliability testing for the composite measures, the response difference between client and contractor group is explored through conducting paired samples t-test. Subsequently, cluster analysis is conducted to produce a taxonomy of collaborative working and correlation and regression analysis are conducted to explore the associations between collaborative working and project performance. The final conclusion strongly supports the existence of a strong positive linear relationship between collaborative working and project performance, provides valuable regression formulas to make project performance predictions and gives a more precise classification of collaborative working to help reduce the confusion over its definitions in a novel way.

The success of any public-private partnership (PPP) project in a country is largely dependent on the country’s maturity on critical success factors (CSFs) that made PPP projects successful. Thus, identification of metrics and standards for measuring the maturity of stakeholder organisations on CSFs for PPP projects implementation remains a challenge. Though studies on CSFs for PPP projects abound, approaches of using CSFs to develop PPP process maturity received scarce attention. Against this backdrop, this research becomes imperative to create efficient and transparent operational strategies with a view to using CSFs to develop process maturity for stakeholder organisations in PPP projects in Nigeria. Data for the research were obtained through mixed methods approach namely: quantitative and qualitative approaches. Questionnaires were administered on five different stakeholder organisations comprised public sector authorities (i.e. ministries, department, and agencies), concessionaires, local lenders/banks, consultants, and contractors involved in different PPP projects implementation in Nigeria. The data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Also, the qualitative approach was conducted through an expert forum and six PPP infrastructure project case studies in Lagos metropolis, Nigeria. The expert forum was constituted to refine and verify the conceptual framework developed. Also, structured interviews were conducted with primary stakeholders in the six PPP infrastructure project case studies in the study area. The research identified fourteen CSFs that made PPP infrastructure projects successful in Nigeria. These CSFs were employed for capability maturity levels definition ranging from level 1(Ad hoc) to level 5(Optimising) in accordance to Capability Maturity Model (CMM) concept. This led to the development of stakeholder organisations capability enhancement framework (SOCEF) in PPP infrastructure projects in Nigeria. The framework was validated by PPP experts to ensure it is comprehensive, objective, practical, replicable, reliable, and suitable for use in Nigeria. Thus, a quantitative assessment tool was developed with the framework in assessing the current capability maturity levels of stakeholder organisations involved in PPP infrastructure projects on fourteen CSFs identified in this research. The findings revealed that public sector organisations were between maturity level 1 and maturity level 2 (out of 5 maturity levels) on CSFs applicable to them. The majority of the private sector organisations were in maturity level 2 on CSFs associated with them. It is established in this research that Nigeria’s maturity is between maturity level 1 and maturity level 2 (out of 5 maturity levels) on CSFs that made PPP infrastructure projects successful. The findings emanated from this research provided both the theoretical and practical contributions to knowledge. The theoretical contributions include the methodology for developing capability maturity levels in PPPs, new insights into the usefulness of CSFs in PPP projects, and contributed to the wider body of knowledge of process improvement in the construction industry at large. The practical contributions are the capability level definitions and enhancement framework for PPP practice, and the specific CSFs for PPP infrastructure projects in Nigeria. The framework developed in this research had provided the benchmark for the identification of methodical approach and standard to process improvement in PPP infrastructure projects in Nigeria. It is believed that the framework would provide a useful guide and roadmaps for improvement by indicating ‘what’ needs to be done by stakeholder organisations involved in PPP projects in achieving higher capability maturity levels on identified CSFs for PPP projects in Nigeria and developing countries at large. Thus, the framework could be used to benchmark future studies.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a concept which has developed over the past five decades through a range of fields. It is based on the premise that modifications to the built and natural environment can reduce both crime and fear, and improve the overall quality of life. CPTED relies on the cooperation of a variety of agencies; however, research has revealed important inherent difficulties regarding multi-agency working and that current practice is neither sustainable nor does it consider social characteristics which may impact upon crime and the effectiveness of CPTED initiatives. Criticisms of diverse factors relating to CPTED have been expressed but how robust such criticisms are and if suitable resolutions exist has not been explored. Using a mixed methods approach, this PhD seeks to improve and update the CPTED concept by addressing issues of communication and collaboration between CPTED stakeholders, and suggests robust ways of enhancing the social context within CPTED planning. The research answers the following fundamental questions: what are the underlying problems of the CPTED concept and how did they come to fruition; and can the approach to CPTED planning be re-examined and updated to reduce the inherent underlying difficulties and improve the transferability and practical application of CPTED initiatives. The research highlights language and definition inconsistencies in the CPTED framework, transferability and engagement issues between CPTED stakeholders and an unestablished but vital link between CPTED and social sustainability and context. The thesis delivers three major academic contributions to new knowledge. It firmly identifies failings in the CPTED concept since its inception to present; it proposes an updated framework which is theoretically driven, and represents a holistic catchment of all CPTED knowledge; and it makes a solid link between crime prevention and the sustainable development of communities highlighting its importance for context analysis.

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