The green stuff

After the Peabody Trust’s BedZed project ran £10.6m over its £14.1m budget, you might think housing associations would be too scared to use its famously cutting-edge eco-friendly products and methods in their own developments.

But think again. Black and minority-ethnic specialist Presentation Housing Association will soon start work on a 12-home scheme that will use the same materials, construction methods and architect as the 82-unit BedZed estate – albeit a watered-down version with a budget of just £1.5m (“A lighter shade of green”,below).

Interest in BedZed’s methods is also strong among other developers of social homes. Most are avoiding the more complex aspects of BedZed’s technology, but many are trying to incorporate some of the features it pioneered into their own housing.

The real challenge is to find a way to roll out environment-friendly features as a central part of major development programmes rather than standalone projects – and to bring about a real change in building methods, the private developers need to be on board too.

Most of social housing’s major developers are already trying to boost the ecological performance of their schemes. For starters, those receiving Housing Corporation funds have to build to a “good” standard under the Eco Homes rating system for environmental performance, which covers factors such as energy use and insulation, for projects completing next year. “Very good” will be the recommended standard by 2006.

Places for People is using eco-products and construction methods in a 229-home development in Broughton Attebury, Milton Keynes, which will meet Eco Homes’ “excellent” standard when it is completed at the end of 2006. Nicholas Doyle, director of sustainability at the group, says appearance is an important aspect. “For eco-homes to make the jump into mainstream developments, the homes have to look like the kind most people want to live in.”

Broughton Attebury is designed by PRP Architects, which also designed Brixton’s St Matthew’s development for Presentation. PRP director Andy von Bradsky explains: “It’s about branding. The Zedfactor project is going to have a different look and feel to BedZed. Its design will come out of PRP’s stable. We need to get away from the notion that green homes have a particular look.”

But the cost of green developments is still an issue, even for the biggest players. At 20,000-unit London & Quadrant Housing Group, new business manager Sabba Choudhury admits she is wary of the cost implications of specifying environmentally friendly features and is trying to create a pragmatic solution.

“We are looking to devise our own priority objectives to sit alongside those factors that will give us Eco Homes ratings,” she says. “For example, in the Eco Homes standard, you get points by providing bicycle storage, but this isn’t always appropriate.

“We have to consider the comfort and needs of our tenants first. Then, it’s how these can be reconciled to our wider duty to the environment and minimising waste.”

Others say green projects won’t make the jump from exemplary showcases like BedZed to mainstream housing programmes without a more accurate way of quantifying costs, in particular the difference between a “good” and “very good” Eco Homes rating.

Caroline Field, sustainability manager at Moat Housing Group, says: “Ecological developments mean reduced fuel bills for residents but that doesn’t necessarily represent a saving for us.

“We can’t put up rents to reflect the costs we’ve met to put in eco-features, so we are looking at whether eco-homes have a longer life and if that represents savings for us. Ultimately, for eco-homes to become mainstream, the costs have to stack up.”

Field also says sustainability standards are hard to meet in developments that are part of planning gain agreements, where a private developer agrees to build social housing in return for planning permission. “The private developer often has control,” she says. “They design and plan the development and pass on a piece to us. Our way round this is to become less reliant on these agreements.”

Moat is unlikely to be alone in this complaint – most major green projects in the social housing sector have had housing associations controlling the design.

So what chance is there that private developers will take more of an interest in green development? As John Callcutt, chief executive of housebuilder Crest Nicholson, points out, a large housebuilders’ major priority is to “bring home the bacon”. And there’s certainly little chance of the future residents shouldering the burden: neither Callcutt nor Terry Fuller, vice chair of the House Builders Federation, believe the public is willing to pay more for an eco-home. “Eco-features don’t necessarily increase the value of a property,” says Fuller.

Mainstream builders will only build green if it’s profitable to do so – or their hand is forced. Callcutt says one way to do this would be to tighten building controls to include higher standards for homes’ environmental performance. This would have the benefit of forcing all builders to meet the standard, but in a price-sensitive market where new homes compete with existing ones, the cost could not be passed on to the customer.

Who’s picking up the tab?

Callcutt and Fuller agree that, ultimately, the cost of eco-design would have to be met by landholders – they would have to sell land for less, remembering that builders aren’t going to allow their profits to be affected.

But if landholders aren’t going to get the price they want, they may decide it’s not viable to sell. “Considering the government needs to encourage housebuilding that’s the last effect it – or the market – would want to see,” says Fuller.

And sure enough, many of the private housing developments that outperform Eco Homes minimum standards have been subsidised by the landholder. An example is the Greenwich Millennium Village, where all the housing developed by Taylor Woodrow and Countryside Properties was rated “excellent”. It was only cost-effective because landholder English Partnerships released the land at a subsidised rate.

Callcutt suggests that one way to ensure a change would be for the public sector to only release land on the condition that the development met a certain environmental standard. “A huge amount of land is held by the public sector. If a condition like this was made, housebuilders would have to find a competitive way of producing eco-homes.”

In fact, the sustainable buildings taskforce made this recommendation to the government in May, although the government is yet to make its response.

Both the private and public sectors agree that it will be economies of scale that make green design cost-effective – the more houses that are built in one project using green methods, the cheaper it will be to do so. As BedZed architect Bill Dunster says: “We are poised on the brink of a massive opportunity. The government is proposing one of the biggest housebuilding eras we have seen for decades. This could bring the economies of scale that will make eco-homes pay – let’s not let waste the chance.”