In five years time, all new homes built in the UK were expected to be carbon neutral, using technology such as wind turbines, solar panels and ground-source heat pumps. But guidance drawn up for the Housing minister, Grant Shapps, now suggests that some developments will only have to achieve 50 per cent carbon reductions from present rules to qualify.
Developers would then be expected to pay to "offset" the additional carbon emissions - although there is no agreed mechanism to do that yet. The idea of zero-carbon homes was first proposed by Gordon Brown and the then housing minister, Yvette Cooper, in 2006. They announced that all new homes would have to be zero carbon by 2016, but failed to explain how it could be done.
A taskforce was set up to examine how the target could be achieved, and in 2009 it recommended that all new homes would have to reduce their carbon emissions by 70 per cent from 2006 levels in order to be classed as "zero carbon". Read the full report here.
Source: by Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor, The Independent, UK.
