North Wales housing association, ClwydAlyn, has secured funding from Welsh Government to explore the potential to establish a Zero Carbon Housing Performance Hub in Wales. The scoping study will be carried out by the Good Homes Alliance in collaboration with Woodknowledge Wales and the Sustainable Development Foundation.
The funding, from the 2020 round of Welsh Government’s Innovative Housing Programme, will enable ClwydAlyn to conduct a scoping study for the Hub that sets out the business case, including timescales, resources and investment needed and how it would link to other zero carbon initiatives.
If the Hub is then successful in securing further funding it will play a pivotal role in assisting with the transition to performance-based outcomes and in meeting incrementally lower carbon and net zero targets for homes via a route-map to 2050. The Hub will engage with housing associations, local authorities and third sector organisations to help make this change and to provide an independent method of assessing progress. Areas of work that the Hub will be involved in when established include:
- Knowledge sharing via best practice and awareness raising events and publications
- Accelerating learning and innovation
- Advice and advocacy
- Quality and performance assessment methodologies to eradicate the performance gap and healthy home outcomes
- Building performance benchmarking, evaluation and verification
- Case studies
- Embodied and whole life carbon
- OSM/MMC and the role of timber
The Hub will initially focus on new home developments and the affordable housing sector but aims to expand into the private sector and retrofitting of existing homes as it develops.
A scoping study will commence in December 2020 with the findings unveiled at a launch event in spring 2021.
Short survey – Have your say!
This survey is the first opportunity to feed into early-stage thinking about the potential role of the Hub, how it should be structured, and how it should operate. We envisage it taking approximately 30 minutes to complete, depending on how many comments you wish to make. The anonymised results will inform a scoping report due to be published in Spring 2021.
For more information about the project, please contact Julian Brooks, Programmes Director – julian@goodhomes.org.uk.
“ClwydAlyn is committed to developing high quality affordable homes to meet local needs across North Wales. As part of our mission to beat poverty, ensuring that homes are built to the highest environmental standards that tenants can afford to heat well continues to be a key priority, as well as enabling us to play our part in meeting challenging national low carbon targets. The Hub will be really important in facilitating collaboration, sharing good practice and testing and reviewing the performance of different technologies and approaches, and this is a great step forward for the sector in achieving a low carbon future.”
Craig Sparrow, Executive Director of Development, ClwydAlyn
“The Good Homes Alliance is working with leading housing clients to ‘Build Net Zero Now‘. A Welsh Zero Carbon Housing Performance Hub, built on collaboration with organisations across the country, would help to scale-up this approach so that the whole sector can deliver net zero new homes well before 2050″.
Julian Brooks, Programmes Director, Good Homes Alliance
