CEEQUAL (Civil Engineering, Environmental Quality Assessment and Award Scheme)
CEEQUAL aims to assist clients, designers and contractors in delivering improved project specification, design and construction of civil engineering works. The scheme rewards project and contract teams who go beyond the legal, environmental and social minima to achieve distinctive environmental and social performance in their work. In addition to its use as a rating system to assess performance, CEEQUAL also provides significant influence to project or contract teams as they develop, design and construct their work, because it encourages them to consider the issues in the question set at the most appropriate time, and to strive to secure the CEEQUAL score their work deserves.
CEEQUAL is available in two forms:
- CEEQUAL for ^projects
- CEEQUAL for term contracts
CEEQUAL is a self-assessment process that assessors trained by CEEQUAL use to rigorously assess project or contract performance on management and a range of environmental and social issues of concern, arranged in version 5 in nine sections.
Assessors use the appropriate CEEQUAL manual to score performance against questions relevant to their project or contract. Assessors collect evidence supporting their scores for each question and use the online assessment tool for capturing those scores and evidence. Upon project or contract completion, each assessment is externally verified by a CEEQUAL-appointed verifier, and then ratified by the Scheme Management Team.
Once the assessment score is ratified, the project or contract is awarded a percentage score and is then presented with a CEEQUAL Award certificate that demonstrates their level of achievement on the pass – good – very good – excellent scale.
| NODES strategic objective | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Enhance accessibility and integration | 0 |
| Enhance intermodality | 0 |
| Enhance liveability | ++ |
| Increase safety and security conditions | 0 |
| Increase economic viability and costs efficiency | ++ |
| Stimulate local economy | + |
| Increase environmental efficiency | ++ |
| Increase energy efficiency | ++ |
Good practice
- Glenkerie Wind Farm, Scottish Borders achieved an overall “Very Good” CEEQUAL rating
- Crossrail London – Crossrail uses CEEQUAL as an assessment tool for construction work and has been awarded CEEQUAL “Excellent” in the category of Clients and Interim Design. Achieving these awards and maintaining the Excellent standard is a step towards ensuring Crossrail delivers a sustainable railway and sets the right tone and standards for all Crossrail contracts to follow.
- 2012 Olympic Park, London achieved an overall “Excellent” CEEQUAL rating, with an overall score of 93.8% for all 17 assessment packages
- Thameslink programme, Farringdon Station redevelopment achieved an overall “Excellent” CEEQUAL rating, with a score of 90%
- M25 DBFO Section 4b (J28 to 29) Scheme achieved an overall “Excellent” CEEQUAL rating, with a score of 83.7%
Potential interchange performance improvement
Benefits of using CEEQUAL
- Demonstrating your commitment to the sustainability agenda and public recognition to clients, within both the team and the organisations involved, to the industry as a whole and/or to stakeholders and the general public.
- Significant improvements to your projects and contracts through the adoption of best practice, ranging from whole-life costing, waste minimisation, resource efficiency (materials, water, energy) and responses to predicted climate change effects, to reducing complaints and environmental incidents.
- Reputation-building and good PR, including verified demonstration of delivery of your environmental, sustainability and/or corporate social responsibility policies.
- CEEQUAL helps secure cost-savings. Projects report £30,000 waste minimisation savings to £5 million (3.3%) less than originally planned through design changes and alternative materials.
- CEEQUAL enhances team spirit. It rewards teams that have “gone the extra mile” and, because using CEEQUAL provides encouragement and a target for your project and contract team to deliver high performance, it helps to develop a positive performance attitude.
- Award presentations celebrate high performance and reinforce team spirit.
Resources
Overall costs can vary a great deal, depending on the intensity with which a company applies the tool. The following issues have to be taken into account:
- personal costs for companies which apply this tool
- indication of the larger costs that using the tool can engender
- consulting costs for assessor and verifier