Driving sustainability in the UK housebuilding industry around the barriers to change.

Sustainability’s Coming of Age For many in the UK, the sustainability agenda for housing is now ten years old, dating from the adoption of the Code for Sustainable Homes as the benchmark for the reduction of carbon emissions in all new housing. It’s had a messy childhood loaded with conflicting advice and unrealistic expectations put upon it – but now, the industry that has grown up around it has been pushed out of its government protected home and is having to come of age earlier than it had prepared for. The government’s dismantling of the Code for Sustainable Homes and removal of the 2016 Zero Carbon targets have meant that with little warning, the sustainability industry has had to start fending for itself without the support of targets for the housing industry to meet - the big stick approach, or the programme of tariffs, the carrots, to reduce the financial impact of adopting the changes prescribed. Without these incentives to focus the minds of the developers, the sustainability industry is looking vulnerable and the realities of now having to be financially self sufficient are coming home to roost. But our statutory requirement to reach an 80% carbon reduction by 2050 has not changed, and neither have the reasons for achieving it. This paper looks at the barriers to adoption that now face the sustainability industry (Morrell 2010, p.5) and asks whether there is an alternative approach that might avoid hitting some of these more intractable barriers head on. It will look holistically at how the housing industry operates, how government initiatives have tried to impact on this to bring about change, and more importantly why they have, to a large extent failed. It will then put forward an alternative model that is effectively already being adopted by some within the housing industry (Farmer 2016, p.38), and backed up by findings from a series of interviews held across the sectors that need to work together to bring about the changes that all profess to want but none appear able to deliver.