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Towards the zero-carbon home

How can the housing sector help the UK economy achieve zero carbon by 2050? Join Jess McCabe on a journey through green building policy. Illustration by Mario Wagner

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How will the UK shrink its carbon footprint to zero by 2050? And what role will social landlords play? @jester reports for @insidehousing on the UK’s policy journey to this point, and what the future holds #ukhousing

“Ten years ahead, we should routinely be building net zero-carbon homes – or ultra-low-carbon homes,” says @Bm3ePciniglio #ukhousing

You get into a time machine and set the controls to 2050. Step out, and what will you find? If all goes to plan, the UK economy will be at ‘zero carbon’. This is not science fiction. It is a legal commitment by the UK government.

Housing will be a huge part of this. The Committee on Climate Change, which monitors Britain’s progress on climate targets, said in 2018 that this is not possible “without near complete decarbonisation of the housing stock”.

But how will we shrink our carbon footprint this much? And what role will social landlords play? To find out how we might get from here to there, Inside Housing is taking you on a journey through the UK’s green building policy of the past – and the proposals for the future.

Click here to read a timeline of the UK’s progress towards zero carbon homes

Let us go back in time to find out how we got here. It was December 2006. Take That were number one in the charts. The economy was riding high. No one outside financial circles had heard of sub-prime loans. And Gordon Brown, on the cusp of becoming prime minister, gave a speech announcing one of the most ambitious housing policies in decades. Within 10 years “every new home will be a zero-carbon home”, he said.

Spoiler alert: it did not happen. That is the short version, though. The long story is a bit more complex, and involves social landlords plunging enthusiastically into successive government agendas of reducing carbon emissions from both new and existing homes, before their efforts were largely cut adrift.

“We were ready to go. Everybody understood what needed to be done. The construction industry was ready to go. Overnight that was radically changed”

After the zero-carbon homes target of 2016 was announced, policy gears started to shift. At that time, a zero-carbon home was estimated to cost about £120,000 to £140,000 to build, compared with an £85,000 traditionally built home. Developers had 10 years to meet the target. Government set up a body called the Zero Carbon Hub, which made recommendations on details of the policy and kept track of progress.

Simultaneously, the Code for Sustainable Homes was widely adopted by planners, before – briefly – becoming mandatory across England. This set out environmental standards that new homes had to meet – not only in terms of energy efficiency, but also flood mitigation, waste, the materials used in construction, water use, and the ecology of the site. Homes could aim for different levels of ambition, from Level 1 up to Level 6: a ‘net zero’ home, with good sustainability scores across the board.

Many social landlords took a proactive approach. The sector already had pockets of innovation – housing association Hastoe launched its Sustainable Homes consultancy as early as 1997. This was encouraged further by government policy. From 2008, grant funding in England was made conditional on homes achieving at least a Level 3 in the code.


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Metropolitan Housing Group was the first of any developer in the UK to complete homes to Level 6, in a small group of six properties in Northampton, at a cost of £26,500 extra per unit.

The change in government in 2010, when the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition swept Labour from power, did not immediately signal a vast change in direction. David Cameron positioned himself as serious on this issue, with an aim to become the “greenest government ever”.

“The message from government at the time was all these things were going to be taken into building regulations. They haven’t”

The problems arguably started in 2012, with the coalition’s ill-fated Green Deal policy. It was meant to be the catalyst to start one million green home renovations, or ‘retrofits’. But the scheme flopped, and only a few thousand of the deals were taken up.

Access to Energy Company Obligation funding for retrofits – meant to be worth about £1.3bn a year – was also not always smooth going. Orbit was early to sign up to a target to retrofit all its stock to meet an Energy Performance Certificate level of C by 2020. But by 2014, as Inside Housing reported at the time, it would have to meet most of the estimated a cost of £85m itself. Orbit says more than three-quarters of its homes have been upgraded to C or above, but it did not quite hit the target.

Then came the 2015 election. The Conservatives won an overall majority, and within months the entire policy landscape changed. The zero-carbon target was scrapped, just months from coming into effect. The Code for Sustainable Homes and the Zero Carbon Hub were scrapped.

Nicholas Doyle, who led on sustainability policy at Places for People before launching the consultancy Adecoe in 2014, recalls: “We were ready to go. Everybody understood what needed to be done. The construction industry was ready to go. Overnight that was radically changed.”

“Just 1% of new homes in 2018 were Energy Performance Certificate Band A”

One former sustainability manager at a housing association recalls the moment they realised that green policies had been deprioritised within the organisation: “I saw the new corporate plan and there was nothing in there about sustainability. It wasn’t like they’d forgotten it, they deliberately decided not to.”

Hastoe, which had been a leader back in 1997, shut down its Sustainable Homes consultancy. One of its last projects was a report, Housing 2050, which concluded “there was no evidence of a large-scale drive to achieve 2050 targets, even though this is within reach of the 30-year planning cycle for most landlords”.

“The message from government at the time was all these things were going to be taken into building regulations. They haven’t,” says Rory Bergin, a partner at architecture firm HTA.

He notes: “Most local authorities now require you not to make the site any worse than when you started [for flood risk]. But ecology measures have been left to one side for a number of years. The embodied energy in the materials have been left out of the picture – the Greater London Authority is the only authority looking at the life cycle of materials.”

What is a zero-carbon home?

Simply put, a zero-carbon home is one that is responsible for emitting net zero in greenhouse gas emissions.

Building a home emits carbon – in the materials used and construction. Then so does heating and electricity use. Most experts recommend first making sure that the building is as energy efficient as possible before ‘offsetting’ the remaining emissions with renewables.

How much more efficient the building should be, and how much renewables can be used, is controversial.

Material choices are significant, but they are not currently addressed in policy: for example, making a tonne of traditional concrete emits about half a tonne of carbon dioxide.

Another complication is the ‘performance gap’ –a building may on paper be meant to reach a certain specification of energy efficiency, but depending on the quality of construction, that may or may not be achieved.

In its 2019 report on whether the UK’s housing stock was “fit for the future”, the Committee on Climate Change concluded: “Policies to support low-carbon measures have been weakened or withdrawn… This has led to many new homes being built only to minimum standards for water and energy efficiency; for example, just 1% of new homes in 2018 were Energy Performance Certificate Band A. Low-carbon heat and energy efficiency uptake in existing homes has stalled, including uptake of highly cost-effective measures such as loft insulation.”

Then, about 18 months ago, something started to change. Mr Doyle of Adecoe says: “We first saw it in the private sector. Investment companies, construction companies, developers suddenly started contacting us about zero carbon for new homes.”

Towards the zero carbon home 3

At the end of February, government consultation ended on the Future Homes Standard. The proposals were not quite for zero carbon, but not far off: a 75-80% reduction on current building regulations by 2025. From this date, new homes will not be connected to the gas grid, the consultation suggests. Instead, developers will need to use low-carbon heating alternatives.

And there has been a change in the sector’s appetite. “This is something we really wanted to kick off from this financial year,” says Julie Alexander, director of technology and innovation at Places for People. Hastoe is back in the business, too, set to launch its own green building standard later this year.

Scotland

The Scottish government has taken a more ambitious approach than the UK, aiming to meet zero carbon by 2045. All social rented homes must meet EPC Band B by 2032, within limits of cost, technology and necessary consent. Standards also set a minimum floor – no social home can be relet after 2025 if it is in EPC Band D or below.

Lori McElroy, director of housing and energy for Scotland at the Building Research Establishment, says that while this is all welcome, “there are areas where we’ve been slow”.

Scottish regulations also require that at least one in 20 new homes is tested for efficiency performance. Ms McElroy says there is room for improvement. “A developer can spend a lot of effort on a particular house and ask for that one to be tested. It should be more random,” she notes.

John Alker, director of policy at the UK Green Building Council, says: “It’s definitely risen back up the agenda. Among the major house builders [there has been] a genuine re-engagement with the issue. It’s not a coincidence that it has coincided with the Part L review, Future Homes Standard consultation and more positive mood music from central government.”

Paul Ciniglio, principal at BM3e, part of consultancy Boulter Mossman, is positive about what this will mean. “Ten years ahead, we should routinely be building net zero-carbon homes – or ultra-low-carbon homes.”

Government is due to consult on tightening energy efficiency standards for existing buildings too, but what that will look like, and when it will happen, is another uncertainty.

The biggest question mark, though, is coronavirus and economic contraction from the lockdown. We don’t know whether the COVID-19 emergency will take the wind out of this resurgence – or add wind to its sails.

There is still a large amount of work to do, both in upgrading the ambitions for homes being built now, and in retrofitting existing stock. Still, Mr Bergin of HTA concludes: “I’m really encouraged by how mainstream the view is that the recovery needs to be a low-carbon, green recovery.”

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