Building Research Establishment

The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is a centre of building science in the United Kingdom, owned by charitable organisation the BRE Trust. It is a former UK government national laboratory, previously called Building Research Station (BRS), that was privatised in 1997.

BRE provides research, advice, training, testing, certification and standards for both public and private sector organisations in the UK and abroad. It has its headquarters in Garston, Hertfordshire, England, with regional sites in Glasgow, the US, China and Ireland.

BRE is funded with income from commissioned research, commercial programmes and by a number of digital tools for use in the construction sector.

The Building Research Establishment is owned by the BRE Trust, a registered charity dedicated to improving the built environment for the benefit of society. All of the profits accrued by BRE are passed to the trust and are used to fund new research and education programmes designed to meet the trust's goal of promoting the safety and sustainability of the built environment.

Over the last 20 years^[when?] the BRE Trust has funded 117 PhDs on a total research programme of £15m, with other funding levered into the sector as a whole from research councils and European Union research sources.

The BRE Trust has also financially supported five university Centres of Excellence. One of the first centres established was at the University of Edinburgh in 2004, a research and education programme on fire safety engineering. The other centres are in Strathclyde (energy utilisation), Bath (construction materials), Cardiff (sustainable engineering), and Brasília (integrated and sustainable communities).

BRE continues to work with the education sector, primarily university and colleges, to shape the future of the industry and improve the employability of students on programmes ranging from architecture and civil engineering to business management and healthcare.

BRE was founded in 1921 as the Building Research Board at East Acton as part of the British Civil Service, as an effort to improve the quality of housing in the United Kingdom.