Life cycle costing for buildings just got a big boost in the United Kingdom. With any luck, developments there will be a harbinger of things to come here.

“Standardized Method of Life Cycle Costing for Construction Procurement” is the name of new publication issued by a pair of prestigious British institutions — the British Standards Institute, the British equivalent of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute — and the Building Cost Information Service (BICS) of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.” The document builds on years of work by RICS to provide a common structure for reporting building construction costs.

The new publication isn’t a standard. Rather, it’s a standardized way of describing what should be included in a life cycle cost analysis. That’s a big issue in the UK because of the PFI, or Public Financing Initiative. Under PFI, private funds are used to construct, operate and maintain public buildings. The private sector funders are paid by the government for a period of 25 or 30 years. It’s the private sector that bears the risk if public payments aren’t sufficient to cover the costs of maintaining and operating the building. Hence the bottom-line interest in understanding the real life cycle costs of buildings.

The new publication was a hit with that audience, says Joe Martin, executive director of BICS. “Everybody saw a need for it.”

Martin thinks the BCIS standardized method of life cycle costing could have an impact in the United States. One reason is the growth of public-private partnerships in the United States. The more that there is an effort to use private sector funds to construct public sector buildings, the more that life cycle cost analysis could be important.

Perhaps a bigger driver is the move to green buildings. As organizations attempt to take broad statements about corporate environmental goals and translate them into bricks and mortar, one question that will inevitably be asked is, “What are the long term costs involved?” The RICS methodology offers a standardized way of doing that.

“There is a wind behind it,” says Martin. “If you’re going to look forward, you need the tools to do it.”