Feedback from a roundtable held September 2025
Staff from 24 UK social landlords representing over 350,000 homes attended the on-line session. We presented our proposed Environmental Quality Management System (EQMS) and the feedback was largely positive.
The purpose of the session was to address environmental quality in new build homes. Building new homes that are sustainable is crucial for protecting our environment, improving residents’ lives and reducing overall running costs for a social landlord.
Whilst a lot of homes are likely to be of good quality there are too many anecdotes of poor quality [1].
The full proposed EQMS and feedback is available to download [2], and here some key points:
- The proposed EQMS is not intended to create a new industry in post-occupancy evaluations – it is aimed at tweaking things that landlords often do anyway
- As with any quality management system, a written set of procedures is recommended and starter text is in the download document
- The aim is eventually to incorporate all sustainability features in new homes – this may not always be possible immediately, but at least the EQMS will give data which reveals areas for improvement
- The EQMS results in a score that can be tracked
- In essence the system is:
- Onsite checks – an appropriately qualified person checks that physical features, that can be easily identified, are present – the list of features is prepared by the design team
- Off-site checks part 1 – follow up environmental survey of the builders that have supplied homes to ask about embodied CO2 of the homes they have supplied and how responsibly sourced the materials are
- Off-site checks part 2 – first year defect data – from repairs and maintenance logs how many defects have been reported and for how long have those defects existed before they were rectified – the new metric will be defect.days
The idea is that the data collected from the above steps will allow landlords to benchmark their builder suppliers and, as with a lot of benchmarking, lead eventually to better quality and more sustainable homes.
We will be using the results of this session to inform how we assess the sustainability of new build homes in our SHIFT assessments for UK social landlords.
If you would like any further information on this or help introducing sustainability clauses in your employers’ requirements, please feel free to get in touch.
[1] Here is one example: https://shiftenvironment.co.uk/news/a-horror-story-poor-quality-in-new-builds/
[2] Download from our publications page: https://shiftenvironment.co.uk/publications/