Kindly sponsored by ecomerchant: together promoting ethical, healthy sustainable building materials.

Is stopping building new homes the solution to the twin climate and housing emergencies? The UK’s new government has pledged to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years. To meet these targets within the current system, social housing providers have been pressured to follow the ‘cross-subsidy model’ – demolishing social housing estates and densifying them with market homes to reinvest the surplus in the maintenance and construction of social housing. But what if, instead of building more, we stopped building altogether? Our speaker, Anna Pagani, discussed this topic in our latest Twilight Talk.

The recording is available below. Please click here to access the chat, and please click here to access the slides.

Further resources:

• To connect with Anna, please find her LinkedIn here.
• Please click here to access the study that Anna presented. The latest version of the paper will be shared once it’s published.
• Anna also wrote a short blogpost summarising some of the study’s results in the context of Cambridge (available here)
• Some of the reports mentioned during the talk (more can be found in the slides and in the paper) 
  • UK Collective Centre for Housing Evidence: Tackling the UK housing crisis: is supply the answer?
  • UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose: The demand for housing as an investment
  • University of Sheffield: New report published on low-use (empty!) homes across the UK
  • The London School of Economics and Political Science: Fair decarbonisation of housing in the UK: A sufficiency approach
  • ScienceDirect: A home for all within planetary boundaries: Pathways for meeting England’s housing needs without transgressing national climate and biodiversity goals
  • ScienceDirect: Modelling the embodied carbon cost of UK domestic building construction: Today to 2050

For further training opportunities, check out our upcoming events:

• Next week is our digestible update on the RICS Whole Life Carbon Standard 2023 (2nd Edition). Our speakers will take you through the thinking and content of the 2nd Edition with a panel Q&A session with all questions welcome. Join us for An Essential Guide to Assessing Carbon in Design: RICS Whole Life Carbon Standard 2023: 2nd Edition on 19th November.
• Our ventilation series is almost here! Covering DCV and MVHR, these sessions can be attended as a stand-alone seminar, or book both sessions at a special series rate.
• Join author Mark Siddall at our upcoming Thermal Bypass workshop for a live online workshop which explores how you can avoid various types of uncontrolled air movement and arm yourself with the correct knowledge and skills so that you can avoid failures in design and construction, reduce risks and liabilities, and deliver buildings that perform as predicted.