Happold Lecture Take 2

Friday saw Robin Nicholson reprise his CIC Ted Happold Medal Lecture for Cullinan Studio and guests during a wine and cheese evening at Cullinans' canal-side office. Speeding through the last 25 years of the construction industry, Robin's lecture hinged on his experience of various landmark construction industry reports, taskforces and forums.
 

Throughout the talk, a common theme picked out by Robin was an increasing change of bias evident in each report, shifting towards a focus on the client and end user. This goes hand-in-hand with the more socially-driven agenda that has emerged at the forefront of sustainable practice.

 

 

For Robin, the 1994 Latham Report ('Constructing the Team') signalled the first time members of the construction industry created a "public interest manifesto", rather than a self-serving industry report. Four years later, the "industry-shaking" Egan Report ('Rethinking Construction') championed the concept of demonstration projects in order to better assimilate lessons learnt throughout the construction process - another move in favour of client and user. As well as this, Robin described the Egan Report as a significant "early stumbling" into sustainability. How much these projects realistically impacted upon future good practice is up for debate, however they made clear the complexity of true change in the industry.

But Robin maintains the future should be bright. From the optimistic Paul Morrell notion that "design is free if there is a 10% building performance improvement", to the presence of think tanks such as EDGE which continue to debate industry progress and direction , to the smartening of practice through BIM, its clear that attitudes are evolving. Success and sustainability will lie in properly seeing concepts through in practice - in Robin's words "now we just need to do it!"



Further reading:

- The Carbon Tracker Initiative's report "Unburnable Carbon 2013" which few audience members had come across.

- Zero Carbon Britain 2013 report: Robin noted that the Zero Carbon Britain launch had a very poor representation from the construction industry.

- EDGE 2013 report

 

 

NHBC marches on

I have been privileged to sit on the Board of the National House Building Council www.nhbc.co.uk for some 5 years, as well as sitting on various committees and chairing NHBC Services Ltd.  Some architects may think of the NHBC as that body that says “no, you cannot do that!” but it really is an astonishing organisation.

Founded in 1936 to raise the standards of house-building, it is an independent non-profit distributing company limited by guarantee with no shareholders to feed; it provides 10-year warranties for new homes and invests in research and standards for the benefit of householders and the industry.  It is an FSA-regulated company providing insurance cover for 80% of new homes backed with accumulated assets of over £1.5bn. 

There is no doubt that standards have improved dramatically as has ‘customer satisfaction’ but for me the biggest challenge is how to gather the new knowledge to meet our carbon emission targets and translate that for and transmit that to the industry.  Targets are constantly changing but the work of the Zero Carbon Hub  www.zerocarbonhub.org, largely funded by NHBC, and the downloadable publications of the NHBC Foundation www.nhbcfoundation.org are a huge benefit – do read them.

We Non-Executive Board Members (NEDs) are a wide-ranging group with insurers and actuaries, the chief executive of one major house builder and the energetic Executive Chairman of the House Builders Federation, the Chairman of the Institute for European Environmental Policy, a consumer champion, a former Permanent Secretary and me the architect – and 4 of the ten are women.  The new Chair Isabel Hudson and very new Chief Executive Mike Quinton are encouraging us to consider the urgent challenges of the moment:

·         How to respond to the huge shortfall in new housing – we need 244,000 new homes a year but last year only registered 112,500 new homes

·         How to help the Government integrate the regulations affecting housing and not just binning them all.

·         How to meet the very real challenges of (low and) zero carbon homes

·         How to support the transformation of our existing housing stock – we have to reduce their emissions by 80% at the rate of 1,600 a day between now and 2050.

Today the housing industry is gathering in Covent Garden for the NHBC Annual Lunch and will be hoping (in vain?) for words of real policy change from the Deputy Prime Minister.  Either way and despite the dire triple dip economic situation the NHBC will respond to these challenges in the interest of the industry and the wider community.

sustainable housing update courtesy of NHBC conference

1. The coaltion want to reduce regulations but some anxieties/upcoming activities from CLG included:

• CLG (Building Regs) Minister Andrew Stunnell very exercised by compliance failure 
• Zero Carbon now means CSH 5 but 'Code 6 is not dead' 
• security 
• rainwater-harvesting 
• ecology 
• embodied carbon 
• ventilation and over-heating 
• health and lifetime homes 

Watch for the release of the National Planning Policy Framework proposals, soon

2. Some news form the Zero Carbon Hub included:

• Carbon compliance is a minimum standard of fabric and technologies but this is now based on emissions/m2 rather than percentage improvements - much better! But the variation in UK weather is a huge problem; SAP assumes we all live in Nottingham 
• Cyril Sweett have reported that the extra over cost of a Code 5 (ie new ZC) home will have come down to £10k by 2016.

3. BRE have studied Greenwatt Way in Slough and concluded, among other things, that MVHR can be problematic:

• the need for a better research into how MVHR works (or doesnt)
• need to insulate MVHR ductwork in cold roofs 
• watch out for noise from fans 
• it can cost £20 to change the filters 
• better not to put the MVHR in the attic for ease of maintenance access - think about putting it in a cupboard, although this can conflict with need for storage space; dont forget the condensate pipe
• try to minimise the duct runs and ensure the flexible ducting isnt kinked etc

4. Lessons from Joseph Rowntree Floundation's Elm Tree Mews in York included:

• Airtighness target was 3m3/m2 but it measured bewteen 6 and 9m3; luckily the ventilation had been designed thinking the target was 10! 
• Co-heating tests showed up massive fabric failure in part due to construction of presinsulated timber cassettes in a wet summer; wet warmcell insulation had to be replaced and there was much more timber in the cassettes than anticipated leading to U-value deteriorating from 0.18 to 0.3 
• locally sourced windows claimed a u-value of 1.5 but that was mid-point not overall as specified, so rated 2.0 overall 
• complex shapes and contextual arts and crafts detailing led to extensive cold bridging 
• solar thermal only worked in one home - problems included a nail through a pipe, kinked pipework and one with the flow and return fitted the wrong way round 
• tenants didn know how to use the winter gardens and used them for storage 
• each dwelling had 4 controllers - heat pump, space heaing, solar hot water and immersion heater! 

Let me know if you want to see the powerpoints.

Government u-turn on zero carbon homes

“The commitment to Zero Carbon remains in place - there's no ambiguity about that...we can now say that zero carbon homes by 2016 is not just an abstract theoretical goal, but that new homes really will be zero net contributors to C02 in reality too.”

Housing Minister Grant Shapps (Feb 1 2011)

Today's budget saw the self-declared "greenest government ever" scrap their commitment to zero carbon homes. This is yet another sorry erosion in the push for a more sustainable future. The government is striving for economic growth yet this back tracking has dealt a severe blow to one of the countries biggest growth sectors. Mr. Osborne need only look at this year’s ecobuild to see how the innovation of home grown companies has lead to such advances and subsequent growth of this market.

This U-turn was glossed over by the formation of the green investment bank and an a injection of £3 billion into risky green projects. This money is welcome but it is not on a par with the whole scale level of change required to cut our addiction to carbon which 'zero carbon homes' promised.

To find out more see the UK's Green Building Council's excellent blog entry.

Zero Carbon (Schools) Task Force

On 10th December I presented Ed Balls, Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), Secretary of State and his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Diana Johnson, with the main recommendations of the Zero Carbon Task Force I have been chairing for nearly two years.

The Task Force and the officials were expecting him to breeze in and thank us for all our hard work, only to be invited to sit down and explain our thoughts in a robust conversation for some 20 minutes. The Task Force was persuaded early on that Zero Carbon was first about behaviour change, and only then technical, and we adopted the Bill Bordass mantra "halve the demand, double the efficiency and halve the carbon in the supply and you are down to one eighth of the emissions".