Rising Risk, Changing Legislation and Plentiful Opportunity: The Next 12 Months in Sustainable Development

Whether you are ready or not, the next 12 months in residential property development will see some big changes, with sustainable design becoming increasingly more desirable to the consumer and Building Regulations taking big strides forward. Doug Johnson, director and co-founder of Mesh Energy discusses the rising risks, changes in legislation and significant opportunities for those prepared to learn more about intelligent and profitable sustainable development.

Don’t be fooled… Design risk is rising.

For the uninitiated, it may not be obvious, but design of buildings (sustainable or otherwise) fit for purpose in an ever-changing world is becoming trickier.  

Buildings are becoming more complicated than they ever have been with integrated services and new construction methods challenging the design team and construction professionals. Added to that, the tightening performance, emissions and wellbeing targets for buildings means that the line is getting far finer between success and failure. There has always been a delicate interplay between form, orientation, ventilation, fabric efficiency and occupant comfort, but this is becoming ever more important to optimise and minimise unwanted adverse effects.

Unfortunately, our tried and trusted experience means less as the pace of building design and development accelerates and the reliance on more robust building design to navigate these complexities will soon become the norm. As a result, we will have to rely more heavily on design team collaboration and planning.

To compound risk further, as clients become significantly more emotionally invested in sustainability, thinking about the impact this will have if sustainability targets are inadvertently missed will become more and more important.

If you don’t move… you’ll get shoved.

It was announced in January of this year that energy efficiency, ventilation and overheating legislation is being tightened in line with the government’s aim to bring in the Future Homes Standard in 2025. The Future Homes Standard will mean that by the middle of this decade, new buildings in the UK will have to prove as much as an 80% reduction in carbon emissions compared to today’s Building Regulations levels.

To get moving to this point, after consultation in 2020 it has been agreed that, by the end of 2021, the Part L section of the Building Regulations affecting new home or residential building construction will have to reduce carbon emissions by 31%. This will come into effect in Q1 2022. In addition, a new section of the Building Regulations (We think it will be called “Part S”) will regulate for overheating of buildings and your development will have to prove that overheating analysis has been carried out to mitigate against rising climate temperatures.

There is no one-solution-fixes-all to meet these regulations, and every scheme will have to carefully analyse and calculate the most efficient and cost-effective way of achieving these targets.

Opportunity (and profit) await the brave.

There is good news. It is not all doom and gloom. Whilst building design risk and energy efficiency targets are rising, they can be successfully managed and in fact create unseen opportunities for delivering better, more desirable and more profitable sites.

With more consideration of sustainable design and an improved due diligence process, there is not only a reduced chance of project failure but, instead, an increased chance of planning approval due to a better and more robust scheme being put forward.

The development will be more socially relevant and appealing and stand out to potential renters or purchasers. There have also been numerous studies that suggest domestic premises are worth on average 6% more, and, commercially, businesses can attract a 20% rental premium compared to their non-energy efficient counterparts.

If done properly and you aim to retain the ownership of your sites, operational expenditure could be significantly less with little to no uplift in the original developments cost. The numbers do stack up, in a good way!

I am of course biased, but there really are some fantastic projects waiting to be transformed and big wins to be had for developers more willing to understand the opportunities, manage the risks and keep ahead of the competition by making sustainable development a key feature of their ongoing business strategy.

Visit www.mesh-energy.com for more information and to start a discussion about your next project.