As the provision of new homes across the UK continues to grow (MHCLG, 2020), it is essential that these homes meet adequate standards and building quality does not suffer. The announcement of a New Homes Ombudsman, by Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick MP, will assist...
Our friends at Veritherm have looked at the Future Homes standard to see what it holds in store for the "as built" energy performance. Here's what they say: Current Performance Outlook The UK’s is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and this is...
Our friends at Switchee have written a fine piece on how technology can help with CO2 reductions. Commercial Director at Swicthee, Alastair Thorpe [1], shares his thoughts…
The Government has updated its Fuel Poverty strategy. The long-term targets remain unchanged since the last one, but there are a few nuances that are worth looking at. Overall, the strategy applies to all tenures and is described as a “living document”. There is no...
To practice what we preach, we assessed our own environmental impacts. Our reporting period was 1st October 2019 – 30th September 2020 and here’s how we did…
BEIS asked us, via our professional institute (IEMA[1]) for feedback on the recent Energy White Paper.
Our friends at Chirpy Heat have written an overview of the latest regulations and kindly given us permission to share. Here’s what they say (originally published 12th November 2020):
Average long term UK personal wellbeing has increased to 86.16% compared to 84.58% when we monitored it 5 months ago. But there are some data caveats…
A quick word search on the new “The Charter for Social Housing Residents Social Housing White Paper” resulted in 5 specific mentions of “climate change” so we took a deeper look with an environmental perspective.
Recently, a contact got in touch for thoughts on PassivHaus. This is what we replied:
Reducing carbon emissions from offices should be part of any organisation’s “net zero carbon” plan. But how do you do it?
Tracing the amount of responsibly sourced materials used in repairs and maintenance is hugely important to maintain a strong reputation and to avoid costly mistakes.
At SHIFT we are pleased that our environmental reporting scheme for social landlords aligns extremely well with the current ESG reporting criteria (see our publications page for the SHIFT ESG matrix).
A few months ago Inside Housing magazine asked us to comment on overheating risk. Here’s what we wrote:
Average long term UK personal wellbeing has increased to 84.58% compared to 83.69% when we monitored it 3 months ago. But there are some data caveats…
Having carried out several supply chain surveys for our clients, we have been pretty disappointed with the results in the responsible materials section.
From the beginning of the financial year 2019/20, the Companies (Directors’ Report) and Limited Liability Partnerships (Energy and Carbon Report) Regulations 2018 applies.
The latest UK statistics show that we emit over 350 million tonnes CO2 per year. That’s a very big number, but what does it mean?
Green spaces are hugely important to people. As well as providing a place of recreation, they also provide a degree of flood attenuation, summer cooling, air cleansing, biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
At SHIFT we help landlords prepare roadmaps for net zero carbon. One of the things we have noticed is that including the new build departments in holistic net zero roadmaps can lead to significant savings to whole life costs. This is even if there is a little “over and above” costs for building better quality homes, beyond building regulation standard.