Mainstream green

What's the SAP rating? Ask a sales negotiator at any one of the hundreds of new homes developments around the country that question, and they should be able to respond with a number of around 85. That is what a home built to the present Building Regulations should score under the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP), which measures the cost of providing energy, heat, light and hot water in a score running from 1 for the poorest performers to 120 for the very best.

But the chances are that the sales negotiator won't be able to answer. In fact a recent survey by environmental lobby group WWF into the environmental performance of the UK's top 13 housebuilders found only three companies – Berkeley Group, Countryside Properties and George Wimpey – publicly reported their SAP ratings. This is in spite of the fact that under the Building Regulations, all housebuilders should be putting a new home's SAP rating on display.

The WWF survey of housebuilders' governance, strategies and risk management, published in January (see box), found that there was widespread recognition in the industry of the growing importance of sustainability issues. It found that housebuilders are taking a range of actions from targeting reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to cutting construction waste. But as with SAP ratings, housebuilders are not making very much of a noise publicly about their actions.

  Instead, it is the one-off flagship eco-housing schemes like the Peabody Trust's BedZED in Sutton, south London, that grab the headlines when the subject of sustainable development is raised. Such projects are unafraid to flaunt their greeen credentials and appear very different from the housebuilding mainstream, where profligacy seems to be almost encouraged by packing the show home with plasma screen tvs, home cinemas and every other new energy-guzzling appliance.

Housebuilders accentuate the latter in the mass market quite simply because they appeal to buyers' lifestyle aspirations and ultimately sell homes, while worthy low-energy lightbulbs, bottle banks and construction waste management strategies don't. "We do tell people about the SAP rating, but it goes over most people's heads on the first visit to the site. We find they are more interested in the benefits, like the underfloor heating," says a sales negotiator at Linden Homes' Queen Elizabeth Park development in Guildford, Surrey.

Linden is one of the few housebuilders to promote the energy efficiency of its homes in its sales literature. Here's what the sales brochure for Mulberry Gardens, Linden Homes' latest phase of three and four bedroom houses on the market at Queen Elizabeth Park in Guildford Surrey, has to say about energy efficiency: 'All our new homes are designed and built with your comfort in mind by the use of gas condensing boilers, thermostatic radiator valves, PVCu framed double glazed windows and high levels of insulation. This makes the homes very energy efficient, which results in low fuel bills. In order to compare the efficiency of different homes, there is a Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) set out in the Building Regulations. This is on a scale of 0-120. Linden Homes have set their own minimum score of 90. The homes on this development score between 90 and 101 and you will be advised of the figure for any specific plot.'

But chief executive Philip Davies says that consumer awareness of energy efficient homes remains low. "I blame the government because SAP is hardly a sexy name," he says. The company is soon to present prospective purchasers with even less well known environmental technology, as it is producing a handful of homes with photovoltaic panels at Queen Elizabeth Park as part of a package of sustainable measures for the site agreed with the local authority. "We're promoting it, but we have no real experience of it," says Davies. "I don't think it will make a difference to whether people buy a house on one part of the site or another."

If buyers fail to recognise the benefits of environmental technology, then they certainly won't be willing to pay more for a home that incorporates it. Top ten housebuilder David Wilson Homes developed an experimental eco-house with the University of Nottingham that included an array of technology including rainwater collection and photovoltaic panels,but such ingredients have not made it into the company's mainstream homes yet. "From the Eco-House we learned a lot about different methods of sustainable energy," says James Wilson, group development director with the housebuilder. "But we couldn't install them in our homes because they are not commercially viable yet."

"We have to be realistic and careful about what people will pay for. We need to be sure that things are do-able," says Richard Hodkinson, director of innovation adviser Richard Hodkinson Consultancy. Hodkinson's business is working on projects that will generate 25 000 homes in varying shades of green, an indication of the growth of sustainable housebuilding.

But Hodkinson says that question marks remain over some forms of environmental technology, like grey water recycling – systems that recycle washing water for toilet flushing. "We recommend that our clients don't get involved in greywater recycling because of the maintenance, management and capital cost issues," says Hodkinson.

The BedZED scheme might have been widely praised for its design and its green principles, but since the true cost of the scheme emerged it is being cited by housebuilders as an object lesson in the danger of being overly sustainable. The project's housing association client the Peabody Trust revealed in January that it expects the overall cost of the Bill Dunster-designed scheme of just 82 homes to reach nearly £25m, £10m more than was forecast.

Mainstream housebuilders are therefore confining their planet-saving activities to measures that are perceived as less costly and less risky. According to the WWF survey, housebuilders are now contributing to the 12-15 million tonnes of construction waste recycled each year, and they are often doing so in some fairly inventive ways. Countryside Properties constructed an open-air theatre from the spoil it needed to move to create its Great Notley Garden Village, near Braintree, Essex, while Gleeson Homes has recycled floorboards, bricks and even whole entrance porticoes in transforming a former hospital into a development of new and refurbished homes at Netherne-on-the-Hill in Coulsdon, Surrey.

The WWF survey also records that seven of the top 13 housebuilders have a commitment to sourcing timber from sustainable sources. But only two of the 13 housebuilders publicly disclosed a commitment to sourcing their timber from independently certified sources, like the Forest Stewardship Council.

The BRE's EcoHomes standard, which measures homes against a range of environmental criteria on a four-stage scale of pass, good, very good and excellent, is also being more commonly applied to new homes schemes. But, as with energy efficiency and many other environmental measures, the impetus for its increasing use is coming from the government. Sites sold to housebuilders by the government regeneration agency English Partnerships routinely come with a requirement to meet the EcoHomes standard. Of the major housebuilders, only Countryside Properties has decided to make its own commitment to developing all of its homes to an EcoHomes standard of at least 'good'.

Not surprisingly, Countryside Properties topped the WWF survey, with the Berkeley Group, these two companies scoring double the average survey score of 35%. Countryside is committed not only to building all of its homes to an EcoHomes standard, but to continuously improving its score. "Planning authorities are really interested in what we are doing," says Trisha Gupta, director and chief architect of Countryside Properties. "It [EcoHomes] is quite a wide ranging points system and if you choose carefully for a site, you can give prospective purchasers benefits, like low emissivity glass."

Countryside is rare in the housebuilding industry in marketing sustainability to the buying public. In joint venture with Taylor Woodrow it is developing the Greenwich Millennium Village in south London where sustainability is one of a number of innovations being not only explored but heavily promoted in the sales centre.

That sustainability innovation takes many forms, from the attraction of an ecology park to less conventional features such as combined heat and power systems and reduced car parking levels. There were fears that buyers could be put off by some of these ingredients, notably the reduced car parking, but now Greenwich is regarded as a sales success and the developer is adding extra bicycle storage to cope with demand from residents who seem to be wholeheartedly embracing the sustainable lifestyle.

When the developers surveyed buyers last year to find out their views on the village's approach, 80% of people said its environmental and social agenda was important, while half of them said it had a significant impact on their decision to be there.

"The marketing of the village and all the ways and means of telling people have been very successful. People say it's a nice place to live," says Alan Cherry, chairman of Countryside Properties.

Other housebuilders may soon be following this lead as homes are set to get a whole lot greener. The introduction of Housing Information Packs in 2007 will increase buyer awareness of energy efficiency. Under new legislation all sellers of new homes will have to have Home Information or Sellers Packs produced, giving a condition survey of their home and an energy rating and report.

Energy efficiency levels for new homes will continue to be raised, with the next updating of Part L of the Building Regulations is also under way and the supplementary measure requiring band A or B boilers to be installed in new homes which comes into force next year in April.

But the real target for sustainability is the huge numbers of housing set to be developed in the South East's housing growth areas of Thames Gateway, Milton Keynes, Ashford and Stansted under the Government's Sustainable Communities plan.

Environmental pressure group WWF is pressing for all homes to be built in these regions to meet the EcoHomes standard of 'very good'. The government has already pledged that housing in the growth areas will be built to higher environmental standards and there have been suggestions that they may go so far as to demand that homes are carbon neutral. Sustainability may not be an option for much longer.