English Partnerships: quality must be at the heart of sustainability

A call for more rigorous application in measuring sustainability standards in new housing has been issued from regeneration quango English Partnerships, as experts warn on the dangers of the zero carbon challenge.

EP’s director of policy and economics Steve Carr said: “While we have done a great deal to drive standards through exemplar projects such as Design for Manufacture and the Carbon Challenge, quality could still be more consistently applied across the public and private sectors.

“To make a real difference we now need to put quality at the heart of everything we do.”

Mr Carr was talking at the EcoBuild conference in London’s Earls Court, where he pointed to recent statistics from the Commission for Architecture in the Built Environment (CABE), showing that only 18 per cent of new housing is of good or very good design.

He said that the current Office of Fair Trading inquiry into housing quality - the government’s hopes to build three million homes over the coming years, whilst also responding to climate change - meant that a far wider debate on new housebuilding was needed.

Mr Carr’s call came as a leading sustainability expert warned that long-term plans to build new homes that are zero carbon could lead to “perverse outcomes".

Also speaking at EcoBuild, Dr David Strong said: “The drive towards zero carbon is very important but there is much more to delivering exemplary built environments than zero carbon.

Dr Strong, chief executive of Inbuilt Consulting and a founder of the Green Building Council, went on to say: “The single-minded scramble to design and build level six homes gives out the message that this is the highest ambition and most worthy outcome we should aim for.

“However, if we end up with 'zero carbon' code level six homes that are uneconomic to maintain, are built on flood plains, overheat in summer, have poor acoustic performance, poor indoor air quality or other unintended consequences, then we have created a generation of homes that are unfit for people.

“We can't call this sustainability. The so-called 'best' are in real danger of becoming the enemy of the good.”