Green Leases
Green leases have long been recognised as a powerful mechanism to drive CO2 savings in commercial property. A green lease is a lease between a landlord and tenant of a commercial building which provides mutual contractual lease obligations for tenants and owners to minimise environmental impact in areas such as energy, water and waste.
However, until now there has been a lack of guidance on how to affect changes within existing lease structures, which can have over 15 years left to run, to incorporate green issues.
The BBP Green Leases Working Group was tasked with the challenge of developing, testing and disseminating, a toolkit containing guidance and recommendations that are flexible yet practical in providing the basic steps which would allow owners and occupiers of commercial buildings to establish agreements on managing the environmental aspects of the buildings they own and use at any time during a lease period as well as for new leases and lease renewals.
The working group produced and published this guidance in April 2009. BBP members have committed to test the Toolkit within the practice of their London portfolio and feed back lessons learned to continue to develop and evolve the Toolkit.
The Working Group is chaired by Keith Bugden of Hermes Real Estate. The group works in collaboration with key industry bodies, leading law firms Eversheds, Nabarro and Pinsent Masons, and draws on the experience of BBP members who have already started to introduce green leases on selected parts of their portfolio.