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Adoption of energy efficiency innovations in new UK housing, Page 1 of 2

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The UK is committed to increasing housing—the Department for Communities and Local Government has set a target to provide three million more homes in England by 2020. The housing sector is responsible for over a quarter of the nation's total carbon emissions and new targets require all new homes to be zero carbon by 2016. This is a challenging objective and will require developers to adopt energy efficiency innovations more widely. Yet change in the house building industry has been slow and building regulations in England and Wales lag behind energy standards in other European countries. This paper considers the house building industry as a complex socio-technical system made up of many actors who both act together and constrain each other's actions. Through interviews with commercial developers, local and central government bodies, architectural consultancies and housing associations, barriers relating to these actors' willingness, motivation and capacity for change in introducing energy-efficient measures into new build housing are identified. A series of policy responses are proposed to overcome these barriers and help suggest strategies to drive improved energy performance in UK new build homes. In order to provide a real context to explore the implications of these recommendations, the paper considers how such responses may be integrated into a sustainable new town development. It is concluded that to stimulate innovation, all parts of the sociotechnical system need to be influenced by all the mechanisms available to the UK government.