In this episode, we explore the world of sustainable housing design, highlighting award-winning projects and the innovative strategies driving the industry forward.

Hosts Will Richardson and Charlie Luxton are joined by special guests David Birkbeck, Managing Director of Design for Homes, and Richard Williams, Development Manager at VELUX.

They dive into the highlights from the 2024 Housing Design Awards, the UK’s longest-running awards program celebrating excellence in housing design. Discover how this year’s winning projects are pushing the boundaries of sustainability and community engagement. 

Sustainability in Housing

• Sustainability is now a core aspect of housing design, evolving beyond energy efficiency to include goals like biodiversity and biophilic design, which foster a deeper connection to nature.
• David Birkbeck explains how architectural awards are setting higher standards for daylight, outdoor spaces, and overall liveability, shaping industry practices.

Innovative Housing Projects 

• The Blenheim Estate’s Hill Rise development exemplifies a model that minimises car use and integrates green spaces, creating more pedestrian-friendly streets.
• A new project in Lewes focuses on shared mobility hubs to reduce individual car ownership and improve community spaces.
• Richard highlights the Alkerden Gateway project’s adaptable living spaces and the Appleby Blue Almshouses’ blend of outdoor spaces with community living for seniors.

Environmental Impact and Design Innovations

• Richard discusses the “Living Spaces” project’s success in lowering embodied carbon by using alternative materials and notes Denmark and the Netherlands as leaders in this approach.
• Velux reinvests 90% of its profits into health and environmental research, demonstrating a strong commitment to healthier living environments.

Future of Housing Innovation

• Innovative designs from smaller developers are increasingly being adopted by larger firms, showing a growing acceptance of high-quality, efficient housing solutions.
• Richard and David highlight the rising focus on mental health in housing design, emphasising the benefits of daylight and environmental quality as shown in recent award-winning projects.

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Charlie: And I'm Charlie Luxton, an architectural designer who focuses on sustainable housing. Last night, the winners of the longest running awards program in the UK were announced. The Housing Design Awards were established in 1948 in the same sitting of Parliament as the NHS to identify the best ideas among councils post war rebuild.

David: 12 schemes won.

Charlie: Was there an overall?

David: Yeah, there's an overall winner, which is a very lovely senior housing development in Bermondsey, which you just look at and think, I hope I could end up living there.

Charlie: And so 12 different schemes in all different categories, I assume, to try and sort of bring together and tell a story about where we're trying to, to go with housing and improving housing design. Is that, is that kind of a big part of your remit?

So it's essentially a kind of way of researching almost like new drugs in order to produce something four or five years down the road on a mass market.

Charlie: So should we just, just spin back, who organises and runs these awards? I mean, who's the kind of the people behind it and what is the, you mentioned the ambition of trying to sort of stimulate the very best, but maybe you could sort of fill us out a bit on that.

David: Yeah, absolutely. The government sets up the awards and the government remains the principal player behind the awards. There is a group of people, essentially a coalition of all the key interests in the sector behind them. So you have the three professional institutes for the three professions, the surveyors through the RICS, the architects through the RIBI and the planners through the RTPI. And then you've got other parties that are interested.

David: Surveyors have an institute called the RICS. Planners are represented through an institute called the RTPI and architects through an institute called the RIBA.

Will: So the RICS is the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors. My brother's a chartered surveyor so I know that one. Um, what's the other one please?

David: You've got the Royal Town Planning Institute.

Will: Okay.

David: And Royal Institute of British Architects. Yeah. Interestingly, the RICS is actually the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

oh, okay. So, and I don't know why, because I thought an institution was like a mental hospital.

Charlie: Moving swiftly on, um, could you tell us who, so who, the government still fund it? I mean, that seems quite extraordinary that the government over, what, 70 odd, 80 years have been funding this awards. It seems pretty unusual.

Charlie: Okay, fantastic. And how important has sustainability become a focus for, for these awards? And how have you sort of seen that change over the last decade or so?

Charlie: And by biophilic, you mean the fact that being around living ecosystems makes us feel better?

Charlie: And I also find that there's a huge challenge, isn't there, of actually trying to reduce the amount of hard standing from, uh, highways engineers, um, parking standards, and, you know, once you get outside of London or outside of Oxford or the main cities, the requirements of parking standards are still incredibly high, uh, parking numbers incredibly high, and it's really hard to, to drive down the hard surface, isn't it?

And one of the things that they've done is they've taken the car out of the actual street and they put it in barns and in courts where essentially people now, you know they don't live in a road with a road surface where their car comes down the road and parks in front of their home They live in a green lane and they walk 10 meters to where their cars are parked in barns So there are there are tactics are emerging.

There's a scheme in Lewis. Lewis is a hotbed of environmental progress, and there is a development which is being run by a developer that was set up by Britain's Greenpeace founders, and that development will have about 700 homes where all the car parking will essentially be to one particular mobility hub where it will be shared with all the people using things like the shops and the cafes within the development.

Charlie: We've just completed a 12 person affordable housing scheme in our village. And we had nine consultations working with the local community through a community land trust. And that was a really interesting process. We started off with very simple right at the beginning of talking about layout going, well, would you like to have a small house sat with small garden all around it, like the large PLC developers do, or would you like to try other things? And it's very interesting. You know, part of you ask these questions and you dread the fact that they'll say, no, we want the, what the developers deliver, the majority of developers deliver, but when you start those conversations, it's very quick that people end up going, Oh, right.

So we could have more shared communal space and just park in parking yards. And you're like, yeah. And they're like, yeah, we'll have that. And you go, if you have terraces, they could be cheaper to run and cheaper to build. They're like, yeah, yeah, we like to say that we'll have that. And suddenly out of conversation, a very different form appears, doesn't it?

A very different form of living.

We also have to demonstrate how we're going to pay for it. And, you know, in the case of the Woodstock scheme, which is called Hill Rise, the Blenheim estate has taken the view. Well, if it costs more to maintain it. We'll maintain it. We have a management company that maintains one of the biggest palaces in the world.

We can stretch that to looking after a nice housing development built alongside it.

Charlie: But also I think it's about challenging that disconnect and boundary between sort of countryside good, housing development bad, from a biodiversity sort of point of view, but we actually know that well designed urban areas have a higher biodiversity than standard, standard farm landscapes by a long chalk, don't they?

David: It's about, I think, also making connections. I mean, essentially you have to think about these developments as creating a series of stepping stones for creatures to make their way from one area of say rich woodland that existed to another through the new development.

Now, if you introduce a load of really hard car parking treatments and roads and pavements, then, you know, your little bird is not going to be able to make its five minutes. leaps as a fledgling from one woodland to the next. So if you build these things like stepping stones through it, so you have these pockets of green spaces, not dedicating everything as a single great big sort of Regency public open space square, but creating these little pockets, then you are effectively creating a route through these new developments for for biodiversity

Richard: Yeah, there were there. Um, when we look at it from my perspective, I looked at it in the eyes of somebody else where I look at light and natural light, natural ventilation and a design layout. And there's a couple I could probably still share with you, if I may.

One was the, uh, Alkerden Gateway and one thing I liked about that, we talk about sort of choices. Um, this was down in Ebbsfleet down in Kent. And essentially there were, um, sixty seven homes of which, um, 25 percent were affordable. The one thing I like about this is take away the aesthetics and the architecture from that perspective is that they gave a choice to the client.

And I think that was really, really sort of nice concept. And I think that when it comes to design, I think sometimes we have to think of the people who are within those homes or indeed, uh, so buildings that we work and live and play within and what they are doing, their desire as to basically just say, here's the same thing.

And we're sort of copy and repeat, um, you know, Lego blocks on down the line, really. And the other aspect I really quite liked about that they had a community app. And we spoke earlier, David spoke earlier about, um, uh, sort of, roadways and pathways, but they had an uninterrupted walkway and cycle route and the app provided, um, or encouraged children as an example, if they were to walk to school, they would attain different points and then those points could go towards a discounted shop purchase or whatever, and that really gets people on the outdoors far more.

So that correlation is not there to actually encourage people to get out there. Bit like the scheme in Woodstock to get people out there, walking to their vehicle for whatever period of time that is. Um, that was one aspect, which I think is lovely. The other aspect, which for me, um, was not too far away from sort of London and Bermondsey, it was the Appleby Blue Almshouses.

And this for me is really, really fundamental. It was basically highlighted by a United Saint Saviours charity, and it meant that the, Residents of which were going to be 65 years old and above in, in central London were able to live in that area, which was, um, so partly funded or discounted by the charity themselves.

Uh, inside and the scheme boasts, uh, an amazing resident residential roof garden where high level planters offering, you know, facilities to grow vegetables, and that was morphed by really desirable planting and benches so people could sit out and relax on the terraced area. But probably more importantly, when they came out of their flat, there was a walkway, quite a large expanse of a walkway internally, where there was a lovely sort of timber bench and a planter next to them and there was a glazed screen. There was no open pool that they could look down into the garden area. So they're seeing people, uh, if they didn't really want to socialize, they didn't really have to, but they could engage with our community on this internal courtyard. And for me, It goes back to what good design is.

In a really, really good, good way.

Charlie: Do you think there's an element that we've actually got stuck in an argument around aesthetics at the loss of actual functionality? About, uh, I mean, you, you're alluding to designing houses that are sort of loose fit max loose, uh, max. Use that sort of change according to your life requirements.

You know, life's a long time. Kids come and go. You know, mobility comes and goes. Uh, do you think there has been an element that our, our, our mass housing, our, our developer led housing is sort of stalled at the argument about what it looks like, or do we build, or do we not build and not got into the nuance of what does, what does good look like, you know, work like, how does it function?

And I think if you take a step back, my previous life, I was an architects technician down in the Cotswolds. The first thing we used to do when you go onto any site is look at the light. Uh, um, and natural light is so, so important. Now, I think it's perhaps underestimated how we feel what it does to us.

It's probably the most important ingredient I think of any design. It changes throughout the day. It affects us all. Um, you know, and I guess the first thing you do, you look at your compass and, um, see the orientation and where that's planned and you really want to maximize that day space to get that lovely light coming into, cause it stimulates emotion, uh, from that perspective.

And I guess when you look at basically. Georgian buildings, I don't know, from 1700s to 1800s, we can see symmetry and proportion, the ratio and heights of the windows, uh, which will correlate with the room sizes and yet now when we look at the size of windows is being reduced because maybe part over overheating and we're trying to say, well, we want to promote more glass and yet and more people would like more daylight and fresh air.

But actually the industry is trying to close that down because of overheating. Uh, we can sort of basically get round that um, I think so. I think those aspects really, um, I think that's good design and good design layout also, because again, as we mentioned before, Charlie, the colour of the bricks or the cladding, it's you drink tea, I drink coffee.

And I think that's one thing I think fundamentally we could perhaps challenge.

Will: What's the rest of Europe sell their houses on if it's not bedrooms? I didn't know that.

Richard: They sell it on square meters or square foot and what's interesting, if you, if you look at any, uh, any building, the first people say, right, how much did you have, and it's going to cost X amount per square foot or square meter.

And yet we, and I think in commercial buildings, we sell it per square foot or square meter, and yet when we buy the biggest expense of our lives at 25, probably more 30, 40 year mortgage nowadays, we buy something it's got three bedrooms, but some of those bedrooms, you can just put a desk in and I think the way we're living today, especially post COVID, where we're living closer together, but yet further apart and community and bringing communities together is really, really important.

Charlie: Very quick. Can I jump in? You said 80%, 90 percent of the profits from Velux go back into sort of societal benefit. How does that work?

Richard: So it's, um, still a family owned organisation and they created a foundation and the foundation has different peers. And so those peers, it could be towards, um, health benefits or looking into different research, uh, from that aspect.

COPD and asthma is rising because of poor damp and unventilated properties. And alarmingly, Charlie, one in three Europeans now live in a poor indoor environment and so, what we've then sort of tried to do is create a different way of living. So we, our founder, Villum Kann Rasmussen, said that one experiment is worth more than a thousand expert views.

And that's exactly what we've done. We've done about 30 different model home experiments over the last 20 odd years. And the latest one, which we're probably most proud of being is Living Spaces, which is a concept, uh, challenging the way we're building today, which we launched in Copenhagen last year.

And I believe David's going to spend some time over there, um, or has spent some time over there, I should say, uh, within that sort of building. So why are we still doing that? I think if you look at it, 37 percent of global CO2 emissions are within our industry of which 28% comes from the heating and cooling of buildings.

We spoke about before about the sense of community and the use of outdoor spaces. When we look at now outdoor spaces or how many allotments do we have now? So we created a scheme where we probably peppered some allotments within the different schemes. I think the other, the third aspect of the five principles of living spaces is simple.

Um, simple modular building system, uh, can be either upgraded or repaired. It has to be adaptive. And also has to be scalable and I think that's one thing that with the demands of, uh, the housing in GB&I, at the moment, we need to have something so scalable, but they have to be different, uh, really as well.

David: I think the issue of people not wanting to buy a new house, it's got a lot to do with people's perception of value, you know, anything new is automatically 10 percent more per square foot and people can spot that, you know, they can, they work it out, they can see that the new builds come with a premium on them and they also know that they can't really convert them or extend them and try and Build any additional equity.

You just never found it. Some blocks had penthouses, very few. And then over a period of about 10 years, it was promoted the idea that if you were going to build at a higher density and use more of your cities for more of your housing redevelopment, that it would be necessary to build accommodation that worked for larger families and which was able to sustain all the lifestyle advantages of houses.

We don't think we're going to get families living in eight, 10 story buildings if they haven't got an outdoor space. And then suddenly two or three bedroom apartment had to have by planning regulation, a certain amount of balcony space. So it has impacted it and it's also changed the daylighting standards expectations.

You know, you used to get huge numbers of North facing apartments with a single window, but people would be in rooms that had almost no daylight and now that's virtually illegal to build. So that has come about, I think, from the sort of awareness of some of the models that were proposed by the awards being adopted by the people that make the regulations.

Charlie: So it's a sort of positive feedback loop, and you sort of, you feel that there's a, there's a, there's a tangible impact that this is having.

So these people are not motivated by aesthetics. I was interested in your point about that. You know, do you think we've been sidetracked? I think we have. I think, you know, we were headed back a couple of months ago into an environment where there was increasing pressure that everything built in England should mimic the 18th, the 19th century.

Well, you know, that's just totally irrelevant today. It should be about things like how do we manage climate change? We should be worrying about how do we open our windows to get cross ventilation strategies. Well, how do we increase the quantum of space in our environments that will catch water or moderate temperature bounces that come during heat waves?

So we had gone down a complete blind alley in the hunt for some kind of sort of culture war and I think it's really interesting that, you know, the awards just essentially ignored that for a period of time and have kept promoting the concept that the benefit comes from the environment in what you live.

Not what it looks like.

Richard: Yeah, I think what I found interesting, I've only been privileged to be part of the judging panel for the last two years, Charlie and Will, and I think that what I found an eye opener and so refreshing is that out of the, I don't know, 15, 20 sort of strong panel, everybody looks at a building or a home or dwelling with different eyes.

Oh, doesn't that look nice? Oh, I love that fireplace. So I love this, this window. When you start putting different context into different things, that's when good design really is amplified and it's probably what you were saying before, Charlie, when somebody is more prescriptive to say, this is your choice, you can have either a or B, then you're going to choose a or B.

When you sort of open up to a variety of different people have different views on it, it really opens up the door to say, actually, if I were to design a home or an environment where we. going to live today, what would we do? And that's exactly what we've done with Living Places. We said, we're challenging the way we're building homes because we need to, not only because it reduces the CO2, but also the way we're living and we're all living differently now.

And you have those different sort of yin and yangs really. So it's, uh, it's not an easy thing to do, but it's, it's really, really, um, fulfilling.

Will: This is so good to hear. I mean, I've been talking about climate change since I was 15. And, um, Working in the industry for the last 20, 25 years. And I wonder, like, this sounds brilliant, the housing awards.

I didn't know anything about the housing awards before we talked about doing this podcast are the big builders focusing enough attention on the housing design in the UK on the back of these, do you think?

In Denmark, we, with effect architects, a leading architectural firm and Artelier contractors, came up and we took a standard house, And we measured that, and we measured all the embodied carbon within that, and that metric was about 11, 11.1, whatever that 11 means, and we thought we can build differently by utilising roof and just building and using different choice materials, and we reduced that down to 3. 8, and the best way of describing that Will is that If you were to go down to your local supermarket, you'd probably go down the healthy aisle. I'd probably go down the less healthy aisle, but you go down the healthy aisle to choose your ingredients for supper or dinner or whatever you're eating. We can do the same in construction.

The materials they chose get to that index of 11, and then we then chose different materials and we brought that down to 3. 8. In GB& I, It's 70.

Richard: Great Britain, Northern Ireland. I can't say UK, you see, because we'd be losing out there. Um, but yeah, I think what's quite interesting is that what our challenge is, is that without sounding so arrogant, but going back to our founder saying one experiment is worth more than a thousand expert views, we can do it because it's been done.

The context that we have and the challenge we have and hopefully answering your question is that that was down to the Danish building standards. So the Netherlands have taken that concept, that methodology and forget about what the architecture looks, um, aesthetically, but they're taking that methodology of good design and applying that to the Netherlands.

And we've just gone out to do similar stuff in the Ukraine. And part of my role now is to amplify this Living Places to say, and the challenge to the construction industry and house builders specifically, What can we do over here? Uh, can we reduce that down and, you know, challenge the kind of things. And when you apply some of the things that sort of, uh, we look at in the housing design awards, then it's, it's something that is hopefully can be done and achieved.

If you times the Oxfordshire number of new houses by the current way we're building houses, that uses up 90 percent of the entire carbon allowance for the entire county of Oxfordshire before you've heated the existing homes, upgraded the existing homes, or even the people living in those new homes have eaten anything.

Richard: I'm not too sure specifically on the awards we've given, but On the Living Places aspect, if you look at the foundations as an example, this is one example, of course, because of the geology is different, it could be different in Oxfordshire than it is in London, it could be in Scotland, but we used a, as an example, a screw pile foundation, as opposed to concrete, and that reduced that carbon by 92%.

Um, so I think what we still try to do here is just highlight that. And I think also what the housing design awards do for ourselves, it's understanding what, um, architects have as, as challenges. And I think a lot of the, the architects I've come across, it's not the appetite they wish to do it. It's the frustration and the legislation that prevents them doing certain things is become more of a challenge.

So as an example, as I mentioned before that we want to increase more daylight into our homes, but yeah, overheating is a big thing. So the industry is saying, well, actually we know when you do your calculations, you knew you need to reduce the cost, but interestingly, when you look at other places throughout Europe, um, you know, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, um, everybody has shut external shutters.

David: Can I just respond as well to that? I think increasingly the private rented developers are beginning to reuse buildings.

So there was a time when we had, uh, you know, uh, industrial heritage, magnificent mills, some of them look like cathedrals, and these were often converted into private sale apartments. The more complex ones are the ones that were in poorer locations or the ones that potentially weren't quite as good buildings.

They just stood there continuing to rot. Well, the private rented sector operators have got a model that allows them to take those on. There's a company that's won three awards in the last four years, Capital And Centric, based in the north of England. They're doing schemes in places like Manchester and Sheffield.

Charlie: So in other words, Creative reuse of existing is a, is, is a good starting point, but we need, I mean, there's a huge amount of office space that is now becoming idle because the, you know, the workspace demands has dropped to certainly the peak by about 40%, hadn't it, from what I, from what I've heard might be, you know, because of different working patterns.

David: Well, I think the point in particular I'm making is that, you know, there are parts of every city that had a low reputation with estate agents that made it more difficult for market sale builders to convert things like industrial buildings because of the fact that they knew that the surveyors would warn off people at the time.

to pay the kind of prices that were needed. So you would often find a mill in a beautiful valley and say somewhere like the Cotswolds would be converted into say retirement apartments. No one had a problem with it because the local values sustained that conversion. But you look at say something like a cutlery shop in an area of Sheffield that is not considered to be prime residential and it was more difficult for a market sale builder to convert that building.

Charlie: PRS being private rented.

David: Yeah, so imagine companies that are building almost exclusively to rent. Um, you know, the Eyewitness Works, it's 97 apartments, in fact, three of them are townhouses. It's a factory building in the middle of Sheffield. It's actually right next to the local power station. Any estate agent would have told one of the big, you know, House builders don't even think about it.

You know, if it's got graffiti on the outside of the building, as the Eyewitness Works has. That graffiti will become part of the marketing.

Charlie: So in terms of the wider sort of new build, um, schemes that you're seeing, are you, has there been a focus in a kind of a communication to you, the award panel about what they're doing to try and tackle embodied carbon?

Yes, there's a certain amount of brownfield of buildings that we can repurpose, but labor have been very clear. The new government have been very clear that we are going to build a lot of new housing. Are we seeing that coming through the awards? Is the awards reflecting that in the, in the new build sector?

It's difficult because they're building houses for sale at a market price point, which means that some of the complexities that you would see in a housing design award winner would require a build cost that wouldn't work inside their model. But what they do tend to do is they recycle ideas. So they cherry pick some of the more sort of, some of the more exciting creature conflicts that are coming through in the latest designs.

So they're aware of the fact that, you know, people really enjoy having a private outdoor terrace. There are very good reasons for that. You can't sit in the garden and sunbathe in just your bikini bottoms. If you're in the traditional housing layout, because your neighbors are going to be quietly watching you from the first floor bedrooms.

What do they do when they get home? They can't sit in the garden and suddenly throw off the clothes that would expose those elements of their body, which they're not allowed to culturally because their neighbors can see them. But if they have a private terrace, first or second level, no one's looking down on them.

They're completely private. And so those kinds of sort of elements do get recycled on the ground. So they give you a particular advantage. But not the design per se that, you know, the individual advantage, it's like, you know, cross ventilation strategies, people are realizing that houses that will convent themselves are a really good idea.

There's a huge percentage of housing in England built in the last 10 15 years that is almost uninhabitable on the hottest days now.

Charlie: And that's exactly the thing that class O is trying to tackle, isn't it? The new building regulation strategy. Um, you talked about the model not allowing for high quality design.

And by that, I mean, The loosest sense, I was in not just what it looks like, but these features that we're talking about that make it cheaper to run healthier to live in better for the environment. But do you not think that right at the heart of the housing provision in this country, we have an issue that developers expect 20 percent plus profits, whereas in Europe, they would be expecting maybe a third to a quarter of that.

I know it's a slightly different industry, but there's some big challenges here, aren't there, that, that, that we're, I'm not sure that we're totally tackling and that the government certainly explicitly aren't tackling. Do you, do you have any response to that?

Richard: Yeah, it's a good point. If I could maybe just interject or comment if I may there Charlie, because I think that if you, if you look at what we're building today, we're building because we're building to make money.

Yeah. Um, and that's it. Um, and if you go back into history and if you go back into the farming culture or whatever, the landowner would then buy, um, um, create some, um, farm cottages for the estate for people to live and work specifically for their jobs they were doing. As an example, if you go to Bourneville, the Cadbury factory, or was, uh, Bourneville then Cadbury.

who are going to work in that, in that environment kind of stuff. So I think now the foresight now has been funneled out and if you go back into history, we're building buildings for people to live in for longevity, which is hugely sustainable because the house that still stands today is still standing.

And when you look at our, Housing stock homes built, which is still standing prior to World War two is 9. 4 million, which accounts for 38 percent of our building stock is still standing. So we built really good houses and now we're putting up houses, which do they have the same. Lifespan and also, you know, what we, what are we doing with industry to build the place where we're living?

I think the whole concept has changed. I think that's one thing that we, we need to challenge.

To the outskirts of Bambury or Birmingham. And I, you know, do you think there's a fairness point there, or do you think that that's unfair and that we're actually starting to see much better housing across the board?

David: Well, I mean, essentially it's supermarkets versus corner shops. You know, we've got dominant players that are like supermarkets.

They build because they have a machine that knows how to use the whole process of development in the UK from who the landowners are, how the planning authorities work, right the way through to who the local market is and how much they can afford. They're actually extremely efficient. They make a lot of money.

And so the only way they can get the city and the pension funds to retain their shares is to make a very high level of profit for most years to cover the fact for several years that there'll not be any. And that's the way the world works in house building. It's what we've got. There is some amazingly small retailers.

But they also are building a very high rate because they've been very inventive in the product. So they're using all these kind of techniques from development and you know the house types I referred to With the terraces built inside the plan of the actual house So you have these sort of private courtyards and private terraces.

Those are built by large house builders in the cambridge area Because they're being, you know, they're intelligently recycling some of the ideas they've seen in the housing design awards and thinking, how can we do something with this really works as a product now that might spin out and you might see that further up field.

But I think the end, the end result is generally you'll see innovation. in the smaller operators and they invent the ideas that then get recycled as components in bigger schemes.

Because the differences between Oxford and Cambridge in terms of economics are not vast. And they're, you know, but the quality of housing outcomes are, to my mind, very different. And I live very close to Oxford and, you know, I'm a big fan, but Cambridge seems to be streets ahead. So, you know, what is government doing, especially as this is a government organized, initiated award, to actually try and get to the roots of why are some places delivering good houses and other places delivering bad?

I mean, are these awards being used as a mirror to start asking questions about local councils?

At an incredible level, the government spotted that it's worked out that it's producing quality as well as numbers and has commissioned a report that actually was released this summer, which is investigating exactly what the devices that Cambridge has got. And in fact, you know, the reality is a lot of it's to do with the local authority, but it also sets.

Set up an oversight panel of housing experts that essentially look at the designs, many of which are very pioneering and potentially could fall flat on their face and asks this panel, what do you think? Do these things fly? Now, subconsciously, it's actually copied what the original process of the awards was, because the awards right back in the 48 and all through the 50s and 60s, they had people who were sociologists and health researchers investigating whether these designs were actually going to give people things like depression or diphtheria.

Will: That's brilliant to hear. And I think as probably one of the outsiders of your industry in this podcast, it's absolutely amazing to hear about what is going on with regards to the awards and what impact you're having and Richard, you're working for a Danish Scandinavian company. It must be really interesting because I'm, if I'm honest, I'm pretty disenfranchised with.

And I just wonder how you marry the two together.

Richard: Yeah. It's. It's. It's. It's interesting because we're a global organization and VELUX, uh, VE is from ventilation and LUX is from light. So, um, it's all about healthy living. And I think what our challenge has been when we're still trying to not promote endorse, but just, um, amplify our message on, on living a better environment because we've got such a strong brand they think of the product, but we take a step back and say, actually, there's far more to that. We need to build differently. We need to have. In our case, challenging what the industry is doing, and there's continuous improvement. That's one of our core objectives within our organisation and we actually live and breathe what we do.

It's, it's what we're trying to do is challenging industry and without sounding too arrogant, as I mentioned, we've done 30 experiments and we learned from those. Some are good, some are bad, some are different, and we can say, well, We built one, go and live in it, um, and we've done it kind of stuff. If you like or loathe it, but we, we've done it, but it's not up to us to, we're not the experts in that.

We're challenging the industry and I think that's a really, really good way of doing it. And the Danish are always looking at this with different things. So I'm, I'm really proud of my background, as I mentioned before, uh, Bought up in the Cotswolds and worked as an artist technician. But that's when we had tracing paper, razor blades and rotary pens.

But it's, again has moved on significantly from then. And, um, but I've been with the organisation over 30 years now, and there's a good reason for that. And I think that not only on product development, but I think that the industry development. And I think what I find interesting and alarming at the same time is Other countries, you know, like I mentioned beforehand, the Netherlands or now engaged with the Ukraine and, uh, they're far quicker at reacting to housing and, and where we do things and work in different world.

And I think that, that's something that I'm proud to be part of, and proud to amplify to different architects and different house builders per se, to say, Come on, it's being done elsewhere. We've got a great industry here. Let's do it.

Charlie: I beg to differ slightly with a passivhaus thing. I'm quite a, I'm quite a convert to mechanical ventilation heat recovery with proper venting design.

But, um, where do you see the awards going? David, you talked a lot about biodiversity and about green space and biophilia being the kind of the big, big themes of this year's awards, but Richard and David, take it in turns. Where do you see the big next peak of housing is or the next opportunity?

David: I think the key thing is health.

And she highlights in ten different research projects the relationship between actually getting daylight in your home or in your living day and not and what happens and how the two worlds effectively diverge, you know, submariners. They all die in their 40s. Young women in Dubai living in apartments with no outdoor space, they all get cancer in their 30s.

It's actually a senior housing scheme. It's intended 57 apartments for people who have to be 65 to access it. It's social rents, low cost housing. It's a, it's a wonderful scheme if you can get into it, but it was designed to design standards that target daylighting. And that's because there was a panel for innovation for older people about 12 years ago.

And it basically said, if you're going to design senior housing, you want to keep them happy. You want to keep them away from the medical provision that costs so much, then make their environment one that supports their mental health. Get them talking to their neighbours in lovely sunlit areas within the development.

Charlie: It's fascinating. Um, I'm going to just say we, years ago, I saw a German architect who designed a bank building in Holland and they took three different bits of the bank and they brought it together into one place and it cost 10 percent more to build this building and it was fantastic.

natural ventilation, loads of daylight, green roofs, all that kind of stuff. And they did some post op in the analysis and they found that they got a 10 percent improvement in efficiency because people were not ill. They, uh, they worked better, uh, and they didn't leave their jobs. And they, and you think, Oh, that's brilliant.

And it's the same thing for housing. And it's extraordinary that it's taken us so long to To get to this point, but you know, again, exciting that you're, um, you're identifying that and, and, and seeing an uptick in that area. Thank you very much, David. Thank you very much, Richard. So that's it for this episode of Sustainability Solved.

Will, what did you make

Will: of all of that? Amazing. I can't believe how long they've been running for. Like you said in the intro, since the, NHS, that's pretty phenomenal. Quite heartwarming. I think. I'm still. If I'm brutally honest, quite sceptical, I think, you know, if we've got to get this into the main house builders sooner than later, and how do we, You know, how do we do that?

Charlie: Did we get it? Did we get an answer? I think we did. I think we got a good answer. I think the fact is that, you know, it is about illustrating best practice.

I mean, I think there are things are moving in the right direction. What I find deeply concerning is. That it's just not quick enough, there's no urgency. And we know that the next decade is absolutely critical in tackling climate change. And that we know housing in the construction industry is a disproportionately large impact on our climate.

And it feels to me that Hoping that some awards are going to change this massive behemoth. This is this is oil tanker of an industry that is really causing significant environmental impact and creating, in my opinion, a substandard product that is putting wider costs onto a society. I think we need to see some massive, uh, innovation.

I mean, that is just off the charts for any other industry, like literally off the charts for any other industry. As I said, Tesco is four and a half, 5%. Now part of that, and he did, he set that out. He said, because you have this boom bus cycle. Right. So you've got a boom bust cycle, but we need all this housing.

So we need to get society. That's what council housing did is it created a longer term supply. So government needs to realize that this idea of a free market in housing has completely failed. In my opinion. Uh, I mean, I think, I think David made a reasonable defense that we have some small square scale, high quality delivery, but it is very small scale.

Will: I think one of the things that, uh, that strikes me, and we've done a few episodes now where I've actually been much quieter because you are the expert in this area, but listening to people, and I think it's, you've asked some pointed questions to people, not only David and Richard in this episode, but other episodes that we have [01:01:00] done within the housing sector.

I get the impression that people are scared of the big house builders because there was a couple of things that, uh, mainly David actually said, um, Richard alluded to, but they didn't want a bad mouth. The big. House builders. And I think they've got too much power in the UK. I think you, you, you look at what's going on with regards to the government.

They won't totally put up a mirror against the housing awards. They're paying for the housing awards, but yet they won't. So what on earth is going on in the UK if, and it's not just the two guests we've just had, but it's been other people that we've talked to. They will not say. The house builders are shit.

They won't say it. They won't say it. So we, and that's why we won't change. And that's the problem that we have.

They weren't going to throw stones at it. They were the large, you know, the construction area was the largest donor. To, to, to the, um, to, to the Tory party. So for 14 years, no one's been really throwing those stones. These eight companies build about 60 percent of the housing, but those eight companies are fundamentally, you know, not you, I suspect, cause you have an ethical pension plan, but a lot of people have stocks and shares in these companies.

So they are, they are almost like the banks. They are too big to fail. And we have created a system also where if they're delivering all the houses and they turn off the supply, that's really bad politically for a government, but ultimately they can't build anything unless we let them build. So the relationship has got so completely, it's like Stockholm syndrome, right?

That's a bloody good investment. 40 million. If you don't give a crap about the planet. Throwing 40 million at lobbyists and, and, and MPs holidays to get 16 billion back off your, off your bottom line, bloody hell, man, you've got to, you know, that's when, that's when David said, these are very efficient people.

We should, yeah, they are right. But ultimately, therefore we need to use their efficiency and their ruthlessness. In better ways, is my opinion. And you know, they're not evil people at all. That's ridiculous. That's a ridiculous caricature, but they, they are working the system that is in front of them. And unfortunately the government are not standing up to them.

Therein endeth the sermon. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, dude, I give a lot. I care a lot about this.

Will: No, absolutely. And I think possibly many of our listeners will. And so therefore, I wonder if you want to carry on the conversation, head on to sustainability solved. org and carry on the conversation within our community platform where we are discussing the podcast and we're talking to people and we are trying to solve the problems that we are all facing.