The project will be the first private, certified Passivhaus in Waverley Borough Council.

More details on the excellent environmental credentials of Passivhaus houses and what the name means can be found on the PassivHaus Institute’s website here.

Also – the 4.67pts available for ‘Lifetime Homes Compliance’ is utter madness! Designing homes that people can live in until they are carried out of the suitably wide enough front door in their wicker casket is utter nonsense and frankly unsustainable design.

When first entering the housing market people need smaller affordable houses with minimal bedroom and living space. As they get older and start raising families they need larger houses with more space. As they get older still the vast majority of people want to downsize – you don’t need as many bedrooms as the children leave home, you don’t want the maintenance and bills that come with a larger house and garden.

Where on earth was the common sense when someone decided that is was ‘sustainable’ to require houses to be built with lots of pointless features that will, in reality for the huge majority, never be used – wider stairs for stairlifts in a family home, knock-out panels in floors for hoists.

Honestly, both the ‘Secured by Design’ and ‘Lifetime Homes’ bring the whole CSH approach into disrepute and should be dropped immediately.

I’ve posted these views on the ‘Building’ magazine forum on the Code for Sustainable Homes – let’s see if anyone can explain it in a way that makes any sense at all…..

This would set a target of 46kWh/m2/year for semi-detached and detached properties and 39kWh/m2/year for all other homes, equating to a 20-25% reduction in carbon emissions compared with current regulations for a gas-heated home. 

(from Building magazine 27th November 2009)

This is a good thing – the problem is though is that in many cases the Policy makers and writers are ill-informed or unqualified to be making the specific requests that are being enshrined in the new Policies.

There are several excellent bench-marking schemes dealing with the sustainability credentials of new buildings that are nationally recognised and accepted, for instance The Code for Sustainable Homes (a mandatory requirement for new houses since May 2008), EcoHomes, BREEAM ratings to name a few.

However, rather than create planning policies using these systems (eg insisting that all new homes meet CSH Level 3 for example) the planners seem intent on introducing yet another layer of complexity often based on the so called ‘Merton Rule’ (after the London Borough of Merton) where new developments must reduce their CO2 emissions by 10% by using Renewable Technologies.

The single main concern I have with this is the insistance that the reduction can only come about by the use of Renewable Technologies – reducing CO2 emissions by improvements to insulation, triple glazing, improving air-tightness etc don’t count!

Instead we have to bolt-on expensive equipment that immediately requires an on-going maintenance regime on the future occupiers…

Renewable Technologies are important but we cannot be blinkered into thinking this is the only way to improve the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of new developments.