Life Cycle Costs of Dutch school buildings

Abstract

There is a gap between investment and operating costs of public school buildings in the Netherlands. This gap is caused by separated responsibility for the financing of the accommodation for the primary and secondary schools. Municipalities finance the initial costs of construction of these schools and school boards are responsible for the operating costs of the school building. According to architecture-based research on this subject (In 't Veld, Hamdan, & Barendregt, 2010) this split-up results in higher costs during the lifetime. This problem is often referred to as the split-incentive problem. The purpose of this article is to add case based evidence in order to support the idea that an integral approach captured in life cycle costs (LCC) will lead to more in-depth argued adjustments of school buildings. The research conducted nine case studies of secondary school buildings, which are newly build between 2005 and 2008. The schools were examined in terms of buildings characteristics, building costs and operations costs. With the aid of the Dutch sustainability measurement tool GPR-Gebouw1 the sustainability score of the schools is determined. For the construction sector in the Netherlands it can be concluded that it is generally acknowledged that sustainability is more expensive, however, studies indicate this is not unequivocally. An elaborated research of Davis Langdon reveals within a given spread of building costs an equal spread of certified buildings (Morris & Matthiessen, 2007). Our study supports this finding and found at least no clear relationship that sustainable schools have higher investment costs. The study shows a positive effect of sustainable measurements on the life cycle costs of secondary schools. There is an on-going discussion on ratios between initial costs and operating costs. Evans (1998) stated that there is a ratio of 1:5:200 between the construction costs, operating expenses and corporate operating costs. This ratio has already been further defined and reduced by Hughes (2004) and Ive (2007). The scenario analysis of our study shows that the operating costs still have a larger share in the life cycle costs than the investment costs. The difference between the investment and operating according to this study is by far not as impressive as stated by Evans, but still worthwhile to keep focus on LCC in policies for school development.