Sustainable Housing Solutions

Despite the widely available technology and the many benefits that sustainable housing solutions bring, they continue to remain on the margins of housing provision. This consultation identifies the barriers to their transfer to the mainstream and how these can be overcome.

This report provides a summary of the discussions at a Consultation held at St George’s House in Windsor Castle to identify how to encourage the transfer of sustainable housing to mainstream construction practice. Twenty-five people with a wide range of expertise and experience were brought together for two days and developed an Agenda for Action that dealt with the following issues:

• How to reduce existing barriers to mainstream take-up of sustainable housing solutions.
• How to raise awareness of the need for such solutions and how they can ultimately be achieved.
• Approaches for a more rapid uptake that include using regulations, standards and financial incentives,  increasing market demand for sustainable housing and creating the capacity and infrastructure for the building industry to deliver it.

This report includes sections on how innovations spread, the role of City-to-City cooperation, barriers to innovation and the market-led approach to sustainable housing. It also sets out in detail how to achieve the recommendations included in the Agenda for Action.