Mark Bird apologises for being a ‘green anorak’ but can’t stop himself asking everyone to do just a little to help save the planet.

 He is a major works project manager at Walsall Housing Group, which, along with Ocean Housing Group, has thoroughly road tested a new housing standard that will help achieve more than a little in the drive for a green future.

The EcoHomes XB standard is designed to improve the environmental performance of England’s existing housing stock. Housing associations are the first to use the standard, which is endorsed by the Housing Corporation.

The Corporation also spent over £90,000 in funding its development. Mark and the Walsall team applied XB to 127 of their rented homes in Aldridge and Brownhills. Built in the 1970s, the mix of terraced and semidetached houses, plus flats, had very low environmental ratings.

Extensive works to bring the homes up to the decent standard were already planned, including double glazing, condensing boilers and insulation. An XB tool developed by the Building Research Establishment allowed the group to plan further works to raise the environmental rating again. These included water meters, rainwater butts, photovoltaic tiles to power communal lighting to flats, telephone points for home working and recycling.

XB allows organisations to measure the housing’s environmental ‘footprint’ before and after major works, and plan for the future. The effect on the homes in the pilot was dramatic: the score after the first set of works rocketed by almost 150%, and a further 64% increase can be achieved to reach the maximum feasible.

Mark is now planning to roll out XB throughout the group’s 20,000 stock.

“The standard is important because it gives us an opportunity to show how green the business is – all the way from the top with our policies. You can look at yourselves and change what isn’t working,” he says.

WHG tenant Nicky Marshall has found the new condensing boiler, double glazing and other features in her home have cut fuel bills dramatically. She is especially pleased with the shower, which saves water.

Nicky says the WHG improvements have made her more conscious of green issues, such as switching off lights to avoid waste. Now she and her neighbours are asking WHG to work with the council on providing more recycling facilities.

Mark accepts that cost is often seen as a reason not to adopt ideas like XB. But the urgency of climate change means we cannot afford excuses, he argues. “You have to grasp the nettle,” he says. “What we do now will have a dramatic impact on our children’s and grandchildren’s generations.”

In the south west, Ocean Housing Group has piloted XB on two estates, one rural and one urban. Since the improvements were made, their scores have jumped by over 50%. The work also helped identify where money would be best spent. Importantly, chief executive David Renwick says, it also showed which homes simply wouldn’t be worth investing in.

Find out more
www.whg.uk.com
www.bre.co.uk

XB explained
EcoHomes XB was launched in June this year after two years in development. It is a user-friendly tool designed to help housing associations and local authorities plan and measure the benefit of improvement works to their housing stock and aid the overall environmental performance.

The scheme is simple to use, and flexible enough to allow for the wide variety of housing types and measures that can be adopted.

Users assess their existing homes on seven criteria: management policies, energy, access to public transport, pollution, water, health and waste. Each area gets a score out of 100.

The package developed by the Building Research Establishment then allows users to develop short and long-term targets for improvement. It offers a target score that the landlord should be able to reach for each development or neighbourhood, using recommended measures.

The system recognises that some housing types and areas will have poor scores initially and that some measures will not be feasible or cost effective. It seeks to guide associations to maximise environmental performance of their stock according to what is most achievable in each location, and to measure improvement.

Find out more
www.breeam.org/ecohomes.html