The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) have calculated that homeowners who have bought new build houses in the UK since the scrapping of the Zero Carbon Homes standard have collectively paid £5 billion more than they would have done had those standards been enforced.
The Zero Carbon Homes policy was cancelled under David Cameron’s government in 2016, which argued that housing regulations were adding costs to developers and slowing housebuilding.
At the same time, the housebuilding industry were lobbying against it, concerned that the standard would increase construction costs.
In 2019, the Future Homes Standard was announced. It was scheduled to come into force in 2023 but there remains little sign of it. FHS is less ambitious than ZCH, demanding only that new homes produce 75–80% lower CO₂ emissions compared to 2013 standards, rather than none at all.
The ECIU research has found that since 2016, around 1.35 million homes have been built to standards below those that the Zero Carbon Homes policy would have mandated, adding £5 billion to energy bills.
Before ZCH was even announced, several pilot projects demonstrated what ZCH-compliant homes could achieve, with homes in the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) reporting total annual energy bills of between £400 and £600, roughly 40–50% lower than typical new homes.
There is also the likelihood that this ‘lost generation’ of homes will eventually require retrofits to meet net zero goals, a more expensive exercise than building them to those standards in the first place.
Because regulations have been tweaked a couple of times, the extra cost of energy varies but, for a house built in 2019, the ECIU figures indicate that homeowners would, on average, have spent an extra £1,400 on gas between 2020 to 2025 due to inferior insulation.
The lack of a heat pump has cost them an extra £750, while solar panels would have saved them nearly £3,000 extra on electricity. An overall extra cost of £5,150.
For homes built between 2016 and 12019, the figure is £6,000.
Baroness Joanna Penn, Conservative Peer and former Treasury and Housing and Local Government Minister, said: ‘The Future Homes Standard needs to be implemented without any further delay.
‘The longer the government waits the greater the missed opportunity to build more energy efficient homes – saving customers money on their energy bills. Pioneering housebuilders have shown it can be done – the government now needs to get on with it.’
Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at the ECIU, said ‘Governments giving into house builder lobbying has left Britain with more poor quality homes, more dependent on foreign gas and more exposed to the highly volatile gas markets during the ongoing energy crisis.
‘Unless we lower our gas demand by building better, warmer homes that run on electric heat pumps then we’ll just have to import more from abroad as the North Sea continues its decades-long decline in output. Establishing UK supply chains to build these high quality homes would create skilled jobs and growth.’
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