Government to limit zero carbon home development cost

The government has proposed capping the cost of making a home zero carbon, as part of a consultation process launched today which aims to set detailed proposals for zero carbon homes.

The move is a bid to provide more certainty of cost to hard-pressed house builders, suffering from the fall out of the recession.

All new homes will be required to be zero carbon from 2016 but there has been some wrangling over how house builders will meet the standard.

Today’s consultation has been delayed twice and represents a shift away from the original target that all energy in zero carbon homes would have to be generated by on-site micro renewables.

The main proposals include:

• A requirement to increase the level of energy efficiency in the fabric of new homes.
• Setting a minimum level of carbon reduction that developers must achieve on the site of the housing development, such as through improved insulation, or providing onsite renewable energy.
• Requiring developers to tackle the remaining carbon emissions of the new homes, by choosing measures from a list of "allowable solutions", such as providing energy efficient appliances with the home or exporting low and zero carbon heat and cooling to surrounding developments.
• Setting a limit on the amount expected to be spent on these allowable solutions, to provide the house-building industry certainty over maximum costs of the policy.
• reviewing the list of allowable solutions in 2012 to ensure they will be sufficiently available within the cost limit that has been set and to check whether the proposed list of allowable solutions needs to be updated

Commenting on the publication of the consultation, housing minister Margaret Beckett said:

“With the consultation process we are launching today, we are confident we will be able to achieve our ambitions while giving the industry flexibility for how they get there."

UK Green Building Council chief executive Paul King said:

“UK-GBC has some strong views about what should and shouldn't be allowed to contribute to the definition of a zero carbon home. But as our task group report showed earlier in the year, these are very complex issues and there will be a lively debate over the coming months.

“The important thing is that, by the end of the process, we have an approach which is clear, provides certainty to all parties and retains the original environmental ambition underpinning it.”