In one of eco housing’s biggest tests yet, more than 100 new homes will be built to high
environmental specifications, and then evaluated for their construction, liveability and marketability.

Home Group won a competition set by Fenland District Council to build the homes on three sites, with a mix of outright sale, shared ownership and social renting.

The £13 million project is the brainchild of Smartlife, a team drawn from the Building Research Establishment, Cambridgeshire County Council and other partners in England,
plus organisations in Malmö, Sweden, and Hamburg, Germany. Key funding to acquire land has also come from English Partnerships, Housing Corporation and Fenland DC grants, which have enabled 41 affordable homes to be built.

The team came together to tackle shared problems of sustainable growth. The housing markets of Chatteris and March where the homes will be built has the second highest rate of in-migration to the area. The area shares the problems of unbalanced markets and demographic change that also feature elsewhere in Europe.

Sue Belk, development director for Home Group in the south, is excited at the prospect of getting started on site, after Fenland DC gave the planning go ahead in June.

Home Group will build a quarter of the homes using conventional ‘brick and block’ methods, and the rest using three different modern methods of construction: concrete, steel and timber frames. The BRE will monitor the construction and how the homes perform once occupied.

“We are seriously committed to modern methods of construction,” Sue said. “We were keen to deliver this housing as it gives us a chance to bring together our architects and ensure a high quality of design.”

Unusually, Home Group asked three firms of architects to work together on the project, Avebury, Churchill-Hui and Proctor and Matthews. They have produced a set of standard house types that will aid efficient construction but look very different from each other externally.

“That is very important,” Sue said. “The homes must not all look the same, and they must fit well with the environment and locality. We want to break the mould of traditional affordable
housing.”

Home Group is taking the full risk on the 79 homes that will be sold on the open market – 14 of which are for shared ownership – and Sue admits the scheme will have to be marketed carefully to ensure full take-up. All the proceeds will be recycled into the project, to fund the
affordable housing.

She hopes the lessons from Smartlife will not stop with the first project. Home Group hopes to use the designs produced by the three architects on a London site, as they are especially suited to high-density developments.

For Sue, the project offers great potential that could help raise design standards across the board. “We do need to improve design. These homes are a bit larger and certainly better quality than you would see generally in the private market,” she says.

Find out more
www.smartlife-project.net
www.homegroup.org.uk
www.fenland.gov.uk

EcoHomes standards
Developed by the Building Research Establishment, EcoHomes covers a range of elements including energy, transport, pollution, materials, water, land use, ecology, health and well being.

Each element carries a score. When totalled, the scores form a rating on four levels from ‘pass’ to ‘excellent’. Housing Corporation-funded schemes must achieve at least ‘very good’, the second-highest level.

The standard is flexible and designed to reward positive steps taken to improve the environmental performance of UK housing.

Find out more
www.sustainablehomes.co.uk

Modern methods
The Housing Corporation is promoting faster and more efficient building through modern methods of construction (MMC).

MMC involves using a range of off-site manufacturing techniques to speed up construction, with less time spent on site. Research by the Corporation with the National Audit Office estimated that using methods such as modular and panel construction should:

• make it possible to build up to four times as many homes with the same on-site labour;
• cut on-site construction time by over a half; and
• mean that building performance is at least as good.

Exploring new, eco friendly and quicker construction methods will contribute to the £140 million in efficiency savings that the Housing Corporation expects to make on its grant funding this year, allowing more homes to be built.

To read the report Using modern methods of construction to build homes more quickly and efficiently, visit www.nao.org.uk