Sustainability Archives

When people talk about sustainable housing, they generally focus on the physical structures. During my career as an architect, and now as part of Cambridge City Council’s Labour administration following the May 2026 elections, I have developed a broader vision of what counts as sustainable, looking beyond the building itself to ask how it works within the wider social setting, as a home and not just a house, and as part of a neighbourhood that meets people’s wider needs.

This means taking account of both the built and social environment, providing more than just basic housing, and understanding how a house contributes to the surrounding streetscape. When we build, we are not just assembling structures but weaving new threads into the existing community, and we need to make sure that everyone has the facilities and spaces they need to live sustainable, good lives.

So while my focus in Cambridge is on the quality of our council housing, our planning always takes account of that wider perspective, so that we build homes people want to live in, in attractive neighbourhoods with the amenities they need and good transport links.

We have built many council homes in Cambridge in the last eight years. Initially we had support from a £70 million funding package from our devolution deal with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, through which we committed to building 500 new council homes. In those early days, the Council’s focus was almost exclusively on quantity as we worked to hit our target. While we built to standards that were slightly better than national building regulations, the volume of delivery was our primary driver. We completed our 500^th council home a year ahead of schedule, and have now built more than 850 new council homes.

We have evolved our approach in recent years. We still want to build at pace, but we also want to build to the highest possible quality. Investing in the fabric of the building was a strategic choice. Although it can increase upfront costs, it directly helps our tenants by bringing down utility bills and improving the comfort of their homes. This is only growing in importance as we experience the consequences of the climate emergency.

As the executive councillor for planning, I was proud to help bring forward our sustainable construction Supplementary Planning Document (SPD). Alongside this, we introduced a sustainable housing guide for our council house programme that aimed for certified Passivhaus standards. This was a highly significant moment, making it clear that we were aiming to build the most energy-efficient homes possible in Cambridge.

Yet, as any local authority knows, we have to constantly balance environmental ambitions with financial reality. We discovered that strict Passivhaus certification was incredibly expensive and financially demanding. Furthermore, Passivhaus design is heavily reliant on orienting and positioning buildings in particular ways. That’s not always possible when you are working with complex, irregular, or difficult urban “infill” sites – the sort we rely on to deliver the density of homes our city desperately needs. Recent schemes including Arbury Road and Kings Hedges in North Cambridge relied on the Cam Standard to make them viable.

We have not let this curtail our ambitions. In 2024 we created the “Cam Standard.” This bespoke standard acts as a robust baseline that maintains our commitment to energy efficiency and climate-change resilience, while offering the practical flexibility required for complex urban sites. It is a realistic, scalable stepping stone that ensures all our developments prioritise lowering energy use, with the explicit goal that all proposed council homes will target Net Zero Carbon by 2030.

And now we have the next stage to look forward to. as Cambridge is one of three councils to have secured long-term funding as a strategic partner under the government’s Social and Affordable Housing Programme (SAHP). This funding gives us the certainty we need to plan over a longer horizon and develop the pipeline for building another 1,400 high-quality council homes across our city, with the aim of ensuring 60% of those are available at social rent.

This funding is especially vital given the massive development pressures facing Cambridge. The government is planning major expansions, with a Development Corporation set to oversee significant growth. Our position as a Labour council is clear: we must protect the integrity of council house building and ensure there are genuinely affordable homes for our residents. Through our joint venture with The Hill Group, the Cambridge Investment Partnership (CIP), we aim for 50% of the homes built on our schemes across the city to be council homes. We will be engaging robustly with the incoming Development Corporation to ensure they recognise how vital this 50% target is in a city with such highly priced market homes.

Looking forward, all our new-build sites are fully electric and gas-free, and we want to provide on-site energy generation through PV. At the same time we’re looking at energy storage systems. While current lithium batteries raise environmental and safety concerns, the emergence of sodium batteries offers an exciting, sustainable alternative. Our ultimate goal is to provide “zero-utility-bill” council housing.

They are also designed as “Lifetime Homes” where a young couple can move in and expect to remain for their entire lives. All homes have private outside spaces and are wheelchair accessible, featuring wider doorways and, downstairs toilets. 5% of homes are also built with further adaptations for wheelchair users in mind.

Through our house building programme we have also built five new community centres, seven new parks and play areas, two pre-schools, one library and new shops. We have provided a further £12.2 million of funding to support local schools, parks, sports centres and the NHS.

By building high-quality, adaptable, and community-focused homes, I like to think that we also show private developers what is truly possible. In doing so, we are honouring the deep legacy of our movement. As the great Aneurin Bevan famously observed of post-war housing needs: “While we shall be judged for a year or two by the numbers of houses we built, we shall be judged in ten years by the type of houses we build.”

In Cambridge, as a regular top 10 council house builder, we have delivered on the numbers. Now, through the Cam Standard and our strategic partnership, we are ensuring that the houses we leave behind will stand as a proud legacy of sustainable, inclusive, and fair municipal design for generations to come.

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Anthony lives in a 1970s bungalow owned by his local housing association in Greater Manchester. His home was part of an energy efficiency pilot scheme, where the housing association installed solar panels, triple glazed windows, new doors and cavity wall insulation. The retrofit works have brought his home up to Energy Performance Certificate B, which means, in energy performance terms, his 1970s bungalow is now pretty much good as new.

It’s clear from talking to Anthony – on a visit with his local Labour MP – that the work had made a real difference to him. Not just cost savings, but also the benefits to his health. He told us:

“The solar panels are great – some days the smart meter hardly moves and it’s keeping my payments down. The triple glazing is amazing; it’s so quiet now, where it was noisy before.
“Overall I feel like the heat stays in my house and I haven’t needed to have it on as much.
“This work has changed my life completely.”

You hear stories like Anthony’s whenever you visit residents who’ve benefitted from investment in the energy efficiency of their homes. And there’s an increasing number of them. In a quiet revolution, housing associations and councils across England have spent the last few years piloting ways to make homes cosier and greener. We’ve now got approaches that work in a range of circumstances; what we need is the support to roll these out to more homes.

That means a long-term plan for home energy efficiency. The reason retrofit has never reached scale before is the stop-start, feast and famine approach to funding that consecutive Governments have adopted.

The Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, which contributes to the cost of energy efficiency upgrades in council and housing association homes, is a good example. Last Autumn’s bidding round offered up to £800m of match-funding to councils and housing associations. The round this Autumn is worth just £80m. A welcome top-up, but not the long-term, predictable funding that councils and housing associations need.

Why do we need support from Government? Simply, because the cost of energy efficiency works is huge. The housing association sector alone is planning to invest £70bn by 2050 in the fabric, heating systems and components of their existing homes. But fully decarbonising all housing association homes – vital to deliver on net zero ambitions like Labour’s green power mission – will cost at least a further £36bn.

Government support helps us fill that gap. Every penny the Government invests in energy efficiency is a penny that doesn’t have to come out of budgets for much-needed new social housing.

And there’s consensus across our sector on what’s needed. We want to see the current Government bring forward the balance of their pledged £3.8bn for social housing decarbonisation as soon as possible. That would create the certainty our sector needs to continue their good work.

In the longer-term though, we need a much more ambitious plan to deliver energy efficiency improvements in social housing – and in other tenures, too. There’s broad consensus across those working on greening our housing that a commitment of at least £6bn per year is what’s required to roll-out energy efficiency improvements at the scale needed to tackle our cost of living, energy security and climate change crises.

That’s why – at Labour Housing Group’s retrofit fringe in Liverpool – we were pleased to hear Shadow Minister for Clean Power and Consumers, Jeff Smith MP, reiterate Labour’s commitment to delivering a £6bn per annum warm homes plan by the end of a Labour Government’s first term.

Our homes are fundamental to our health and wellbeing. Decent and affordable homes like Anthony’s must be available for everyone, but right now they’re not.

The lack of a long-term plan for housing has led to the housing crisis we are living through today. The issues we face around housing are systemic. If we don’t act to fix the housing crisis, things will get much worse for people living in England.

A sustained commitment to funding energy efficiency works at scale is a vital part of the long-term plan for housing that we need.

Social housing has a retrofit model, we know what works, but we need the support to roll out that model at scale. It can start in the social rented sector but moving quickly into the private rented sector, where standards are worst, and into the owner-occupied sector.

So we need support from all political parties to invest in energy efficiency. It’s the biggest single thing parties can do to make sure that more people benefit from works like those to Anthony’s home; improvements that – in his words – have changed his life.

Rhys Moore

Rhys is the Executive Director of Public Impact at the National Housing Federation

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Tracy Harrison

Tracy is the Chief Executive of the Northern Housing Consortium

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