Sustainability, however, is a dog of a word; so popular and so abused it’s in danger of meaning nothing at all. It should mean using our planet’s resources in such a way that we don’t deny them to future generations. But these days the government sprawls it over every other document, so it has become such a big, flaccid, empty bag of a word you can stuff it with whatever you like: sheep’s wool insulation, or community regeneration schemes, or just hot air.
The virtues of condensing gas boilers aside, Britain’s construction industry largely ignores thrift: we live in some of the most poorly built, under-insulated housing in Europe. Our homes leak heat, use a host of environmentally damaging and unrecyclable materials, and are often put together by people with the minimum of skill. We shouldn’t be naming our homes “The Beeches” or “Park View” but “Trabant” and “Morris Marina”.
So, in theory, we should applaud John Prescott’s consultation paper on sustainable building. Domestic energy use is responsible for about a quarter of all CO2 produced, and our homes use about half the available water in Britain (we have, amazingly, less available water than Spain). So energy and water efficiency are two of the principal thrusts of the deputy prime minister’s document, along with surface water management; site waste management during construction (which at the moment is fabulously inefficient); household waste management (making sure we produce enough compost and deposit it in the right places); and general use of materials. The consultation paper is supposed to generate new building codes, from April 2007, to set a series of standards for general and house construction and performance.
This is all wonderful. It’s like going to Tesco and discovering it has gone 100% wholemeal, gluten-free, free trade, organic from local suppliers only, and decided to pay staff a basic pay of five times the minimum wage. It has to be too good to be true.
And it is. Because we don’t need this new code. We already have one: the Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (Breeam), and it produces what’s called an EcoHomes rating on four grades from “pass” to “excellent”. And it works. Dotted around Britain are clusters of beautifully put together housing schemes that score “excellent”, such as the ambitious, semi-high-rise Greenwich Millennium Village next to the Dome. Or the Wintles in Shropshire, a collection of contemporary timber-framed, glass-walled and rather beautiful executive homes. Or Great Bow Yard, a small riverside development at Langport on the Somerset Levels.
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At first glance, the Langport houses are remarkably conventional: a sturdy timber-panelled and framed structure sits on a concrete plinth and ground course (the risk of flooding means that the timber couldn’t sit directly on the plinth); internal walls are plasterboard and are lined with mineral wool insulation, and the places are heated by gas. All standard stuff and not a batt of sheep’s wool or a straw bale in sight. So far, so normal. But these houses are anything but.
They are excellent examples of just how environmentally well thought-out a house can be. And we know they are excellent because the BRE EcoHomes assessment system rates them as such — and it doesn’t award such a rating very often.
The dwellings gain their eco-credentials partly because of the considered use of materials (there is actually a lot of timber in the structure) and partly because they’re so super-insulated that the energy required to run them is minimal, as Reg Huzzey, a retired GP, and his wife Margaret, a former biology teacher, have found. “This place feels intrinsically warm,” says Margaret. “It hasn’t got that cold feeling you get with new buildings.”
There is, of course, a panoply of bolt-on technology to lift the performance of these houses into the EcoHomes “excellent” category. All store and use rainwater for toilet flushing; the glazed fronts are orientated to capture solar heat and store it in the high thermal-mass of the concrete plinth; there are sunrooms to the front that effectively quadruple-glaze the buildings; solar panels are being fitted in spring for the hot water supply and a car-share scheme is planned.
When moving from Devon last year, the Huzzeys viewed the market quite coolly, looking for a well-built home somewhere near to a town centre, with good public transport. Margaret says that nothing else on the market “came close” to Great Bow Yard.
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Their four-bed home cost £330,000, but came with the promise of minimal running costs. The sustainable value of the place appeals to Margaret’s natural sense of thrift, but it wasn’t a primary consideration. “We’re pleased to be part of it, and there’s something deeply satisfying about living among people who share your values. But if this place had been much more expensive we wouldn’t have bought it. We’re not in a position to sacrifice money for a philosophical point.”
On the other hand, their neighbour Chrissie Amey, 55, a learning support tutor at Somerset College, feels she paid a small premium for her £280,000 three-bed home, but believes it was worth it. “I like the ethical component, the moral sense about living here, but there are no compromises to my life.
“I just fell in love with what they were trying to do here — change the way things are built — and I love the design. This is very easy to live in and it’s an exciting home to live in.”
If anything, the uniqueness of an EcoHomes rating is a mark of exemplary performance, because EcoHomes is “constitutionally committed” to assessing beyond a level set by the building regulations. And despite one or two minor failings, the EcoHomes method is considered, worldwide, to be without peer, even by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). As of April this year, the Housing Corporation will demand that all housing projects it supports meet the EcoHomes “very good” standard as a minimum requirement. English Partnerships, the government’s regeneration agency, already make this a requirement. So, then, the EcoHomes rating has a proven track record, sets truly demanding standards and is about to be adopted pretty well across the country. Excellent.
Which makes it an obvious candidate for scrapping. In the eyes of the ODPM, it needs to be replaced with, well, their own code of course, which it turns out could be altogether more woolly. The government’s consultation document on the new code is available for comment and discussion, by anybody, on the ODPM’s website until March. There’s still time to change things. Follow the link below, read the draft, and then fill out a form with your comments. If enough of you do that and insist on the pegging of the code to the BRE EcoHomes standards (I am of course assuming you agree with me), then it may improve the code, create a worthy successor to the EcoHomes scheme, and give the developers a run for their money.
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To download the consultation paper for the Code for Sustainable Homes and a questionnaire about it, visit www.odpm.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1162094 If you have any better suggestions for words to replace sustainable, email me at kevin.mccloud@sunday-times.co.uk. And also send me any examples of inappropriate use of the word sustainable. We’ll publish the best one.
Great Bow Yard, Greenwich Millennium Village and The Wintles, visit www.greenmoves.com