Building affordable housing on rural exception sites is a difficult business, involving a wide range of stakeholders, and the funding structure is strict. If an RSL is to invest in raising the sustainability standards of its properties across the board, it has to do this from the basis of reliable information – it can’t afford for projects to go wrong.
It was in this climate that the Lingwood GreenGauge Homes project was born, in 2005, when achieving the EcoHomes ‘Very Good’ rating was the standard, and two years before Level 3 of the Code for Sustainable Homes would be the minimum required level for all Grant Funded housing in England and Wales.
The Brief for Lingwood was to be:
- 15 houses for rent and shared ownership on a conventional exception site, suitable for a conventional mix of tenants.
- Built to EcoHomes Excellent rating, in advance of its peers.
- Trialling a range of technologies for reducing the carbon load of the construction and energy in use
- Cheaper to run, reduce running costs for tenants and promoting sustainable energy use
- Monitored both socially and environmentally to inform future projects.
- Able to be built within the standard funding structure.
It was hoped that the collection of real data from real tenants in replicable houses would provide the information that product manufacturers could not – information about how the technologies would work on the ground. This project was not an ‘experimental scheme’ and uses readily available products to produce exemplar affordable houses.
Coming Next – About the Houses
