What Changes do Low Carbon Homes Bring for Residents?

What has changed?

Recent announcements of the UK Government’s Future Homes Standard have highlighted how the inclusion of solar panels and heat pumps will be mandated for most new homes in England from 2028 onwards.[1] The standard also proposes building fabric changes, including enhanced airtightness requirements, and wastewater heat recovery.[2] As well as supporting decarbonisation goals, the standard is described as offering further benefits such as providing certainty to the supply chain, alleviating fuel poverty and offering greater energy security.[3] The latter is an increasingly pressing concern in light of recent energy price rises following global conflicts.[4]

What does this mean?

Making changes to the material aspects of homes is only part of the picture. As social scientists we know that the move away from fossil fuel heating systems to renewable sources, and living in homes that can also generate energy, will involve changes for residents too. Understanding resident perspectives is a crucial part of broader transitions to low carbon housing. For example, existing research has highlighted the ‘energy performance gap’ where buildings or technologies do not perform as anticipated.[5] Often this is attributed to the way that technologies are being used by residents, with the importance of resident education and behaviour change emphasised.[6] This illustrates something well-known in the health protection domain - that people’s behaviours and practices are shaped by the broader systems in which they are embedded - in this case comprising the building designers and design standards, the particular low carbon technologies adopted, as well as information provision alongside social networks and resources available for supporting residents. Our own research on low carbon buildings has taken a detailed look at how developers envisage future residents and how this impacts decisions around design, controls and information provision. We have highlighted how this relates to expectations regarding resident behaviour change, which in turn impacts resident experiences in the homes.[7]

Has this been done elsewhere in the UK?

While the Future Homes Standard mandates new requirements in England, earlier introductions of similar standards in other parts of the UK has meant, for example, that fossil fuels have not been included in social housing in Wales since 2021.[8] The Welsh Government have also provided financial support for new homes through the Innovative Housing Programme, facilitating a number of sustainable housing developments across the country.[9] Our work in Wales with some of the residents of early low carbon home developments provides important insights into experiences in these communities, which has wider relevance to future developments adopting similar standards. Through two EPSRC funded research projects (EPSRC Place Based Impact Acceleration Account The SWITCH to Net Zero Buildings), we have undertaken interviews with residents in a range of sites across a period of several years to gather a detailed perspective on life in these homes.

What do residents think?

In order to find out what those living in low carbon home think about them and the changes they enable, we take a qualitative longitudinal approach, meaning that we speak to participants on more than one occasion. In these studies, we interviewed participants before they moved in, early post-occupancy, then after 12 months and up to 4 years post-occupancy. Doing interviews at different time points means that we can capture changes and developments in participants’ accounts over time, which may change in relation to their lived experiences as well as wider events. Importantly for work on behaviour change, our research insights raise questions for the conceptualisation of moving house as a moment of change for behavioural intervention, instead showing how living in a new low carbon home is an ongoing process of learning for many residents.[10] 

During interviews, residents have expressed their willingness to make changes if they have information about the most efficient way of using their home, but often feel that this information is lacking.[11] As part of our collaboration between Cardiff and UCL in the Environment and Sustainability theme of BR-UK, we’ll be revisiting these datasets to explore in more detail where residents speak of being willing and able to make changes, where they describe their home as ‘pushing’ them to do things differently, and where and why this might be resisted.

Speaking to residents at different time points is also important because homes, particularly those with solar generation, perform differently across seasons and weather conditions. For example, some residents who moved into their homes during winter described disappointment at higher than anticipated energy bills, but had a different view of the home’s affordability when interviewed again several months later having benefited from exporting electricity over the summer. 

What additional research is BR-UK undertaking?

One aspect of our BR-UK sustainability work will involve looking in more detail at residents’ experiences of summer heat events, in light of increasing concerns about risks of overheating in new build homes.[12] Resident summer overheating is a critical issue given the increasing frequency and severity of heatwaves now occurring across the UK, as highlighted by BR-UK,[13] as well as a major gap in the literature on behaviour in low carbon homes. In revisiting our datasets, we will explore resident accounts of both homes that overheat and those that are described as maintaining a comfortable temperature, to identify potential implications for building design, mitigation actions for residents, and communication strategies during extreme events.