Housing Forum responds to the Future Homes Standard Consultation

The Housing Forum welcomes the Government’s commitment to delivering warm, safe and decent homes in setting these new standards for Future Homes. Upfront costs, running costs and eliminating carbon emissions are all important to our members across the housing sector. We welcome the approach to balancing these priorities. We have made the following points in our response:

– The consultation suggests that the increased costs will be passed on to landowners via lower land prices, but we believe this does not always apply – especially in weaker housing markets, challenging brownfield sites or sites that are already owned by housebuilders or social landlords when the new standards come into effect. Social landlords do not currently have any capacity to charge higher rents for housing that is more energy efficient, so the full costs of meeting the higher standards will fall on their own budgets. This means that the grant for social housing will need to be increased to cover the additional upfront costs.

– We are broadly supportive of the more ambitious Option 1 (higher upfront costs and lower energy use) but have some concerns around the real-world performance of mechanical cooling, which may not be needed in all areas and can cause problems with noise in urban areas. Passive cooling systems such as shading may be more appropriate in some areas.

– We are aware of concerns around the transitional timescales, particularly that the new HEM must be fully operational before the regulations come into effect. There are concerns about the capacity of the heat pump industry and with the skills needed to fit mechanical ventilation, as well as with the capacity of the grid system. A coordinated approach is needed between government departments to ensure that the grid system can cope with the requirements of the Future Homes Standard and also with other policies that increase electricity demand (such as electric vehicles, retrofitting heat pumps to existing homes and new data centres).

– The priority for the Future Homes Standard should be to ensure that new housing can be zero-carbon ready. However, the cost of heating homes is a critical one – particularly to our social housing provider members – as high costs are a big problem for low-income households. It is therefore critical that the government takes action to ensure that electricity is affordable to all. This could be done via a range of different means such as removing the green tariffs and other charges from electricity bills and ensuring that welfare payments are sufficient to support lower income households.

– We would like to see a more ambitious approach to post-occupancy evaluation, with joint working between housing providers and developers to share lessons learned and promote a culture of continuous improvement.

Futureproofing and long-term sustainability are critical. The Future Homes Standard needs to ensure that homes are easy and cost-effective to maintain and should not require any foreseeable refurbishment for at least 20 years. We look forward to helping the housing sector to build homes to the new standard, reducing carbon emissions and driving up the quality of our homes.

You can read our response in full here.

The Government is also consulting on the new Home Energy Model, which will replace the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) system for estimating the energy usage of buildings. We welcome this new and updated tool and have given some high-level input into this consultation which you can read here.