Beyond Bricks

Overall, around 25% of the planet heating gases released in the UK can be attributed to the built environment, with a large proportion of this coming from our homes and the construction industry.

But we’re also facing a housing crisis. We urgently need to build hundreds of thousands of new homes. If we’re going to do this without worsening the climate and ecological crisis, then it’s important to understand where the impact is coming from:

(1)    Embodied carbon – this is the carbon that has been emitted through the manufacture and transport of the materials used ina house’s construction. Huge amounts of energy are required to produce the standard materials used in our modern homes, such as concrete, steel and glass.

(2)    Operational carbon – this is the carbon that is produced through the way that we live in our homes. This can come from the type of energy we use (fossil fuel or renewable) – but also from the amount of energy wasted. The UK has some of the oldest and most poorly-built housing in Europe, with homes that are notoriously ‘leaky’ due to things like solid wall construction, lack of double glazing or poor insulation.

(3)    Demolition – too often, ‘old’ houses or buildings are demolished when, with some thought and planning, they could be renovated and made fit for the future –  which would entail a vastly lower climate cost. Demolishing and dumping carbon-heavy materials, such as concrete, is a terrible waste of resources. Given the huge volume of debris dumped, construction waste(mostly from demolition but also of new materials) is responsible for over one-third of all the UK’s landfill waste!

(4)    Destruction of nature. Aside from the impacts of the materials actually used in house building, the construction of new housing developments can have a huge impact on wildlife, as well as habitats that are important carbon stores. Paving and concreting over previously natural areas can massively worsen flood risk, as well as destroying the important function of living soil in drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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There is a whole a range of climate-friendly construction techniques to explore – from straw bale houses to earthships.

You can find loads of inspiring information about various options and techniques from the Low Impact Living Initiative and the Centre for Alternative Technology. If well constructed and maintained, buildings made from sustainable timber or other natural materials can last a hundred years or more.

However, building from natural materials still doesn’t mean you can’t just throw up any old house anywhere – it will still need to comply with planning and building regulations requirements.

If you’re doing your own building project or even just a small refurbishment, it’s important to check out the options and talk to your architect and builder about what you’d like to do and how that can be achieved– so that you don’t find yourself being chivvied, further along in the process, into accepting conventional solutions that are more straightforward but will have a disappointingly high carbon footprint.

It’s also worth looking at BREEAM, a sustainability assessment framework used for the design, construction, and operation of buildings. This can be used by everyone from individuals looking to build their own house to professionals like architects and major housing developers.

Cornwall Council is the first authority in England to adopt a sustainable living policy as part of its climate emergency response, based on Wales’ One Planet Development. This is called Alternative Living 1, and it aims to enable “low impact residential development as part of a regenerative use of land”.

The conditions to be met are strict, but it will be a solution for some people. Find out more here.

There is a huge proliferation of eco-friendly and sustainable building products and techniques around – many of them embracing house-building methods and materials of the past.

Whether your project is a new build or just a small renovation, you can make a huge difference to its carbon footprint simply by choosing lower impact, natural and/ or previously-used materials, such as recycled steel, sheep’s wool for insulation, or eco-friendly rigid foam insulation made from kelp, hemp or bamboo.

The impact of second hand materials has already been made, and by extending their life you are preventing them from being dumped or burned, as well as reducing the demand to unnecessarily create more new materials.

For masses of information for builders or individuals on how to source materials to reduce the environmental impact of projects, check out the Alliance of Sustainable Building Products.

For lots of second hand items and materials in your area, check out sites like Freecycle, Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Recollective (shown in our film) convert ‘waste’ film and theatre sets into useful new structures and buildings, you can get in touch with them via their website here.

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Cob

Cob is an ancient but incredibly durable building material. In the UK, cob houses are predominantly found in Devon or Cornwall. However, around 30% of all people worldwide live in earthen homes.

Learn lots more about building with earth here.

Earth Blocks, based in Cornwall, is the only company in the UK manufacturing pre-shaped cob blocks and bricks.

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Lime mortar

Lime is one of the world’s oldest and most durable building materials, having been used in construction of the Great Wall of China, theEgyptian pyramids and the Colosseum in Rome.

Lime mortar is a traditional material that is ideal for use in Cornwall’s older properties – but it’s also gaining popularity more broadly– and luckily it’s climate friendly too!

Lime manufacture involves much lower temperatures and less mechanisation than Portland Cement – so it requires much less energy and produces less CO2.

Its open pore structure and flexibility – unlike cement, which is hard and brittle – means that lime mortar is highly breathable, allowing water to pass through a building, thereby avoiding a build-up of moisture and the development of condensation or damp. This permeability or ‘breathing’ can keep the inside of the building dry without the need for a damp course or chemical treatment.

Small scale production of lime is not difficult and can be regional, helping to reduce transport distances, energy use and pollution.

Meanwhile, the lime binder in lime mortars can actually re-absorbCO2 when the mortar sets, further reducing the total emissions.

A great supplier in Cornwall is Cornish Lime.

A good first step to work out whether your household is using energy as efficiently as possible is by consulting this Energy Efficiency Calculator, which will provide tailored advice to help to reduce your energy consumption.

Taking action to reduce your home’s energy usage does not need to be all about extra expense – many simple measures will actually save you money!

You can find loads of great tips and household energy advice from Cornwall’s brilliant Community Energy Plus here.

Passivhaus is the global gold standard for energy performance, aiming to create buildings that reduce energy and improve comfort through intelligent design and construction, based around the following principles.

While a passive house requires very little heating, cooling or energy to run, this minimal operational carbon could potentially be outweighed by the materials used in its initial construction, many of which can be very carbon heavy.

While it’s crucial for all new houses to be built to meet stringent standards on both operational and embodied carbon, the fact is that 80% of all the homes we’ll need in this country by 2050 are already here and being lived in.

So it’s absolutely essential to retrofit these existing houses (for example through improving insulation, or installing heat pumps or double glazing) both to help reduce their emissions and to ensure they can protect their inhabitants from climate change-induced weather events, such as heatwaves, flooding and water shortages.

With just under two-thirds of the nation’s homes (19million) having an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of ‘D’ or below, this means a vast number of our homes are wasting precious energy on a daily basis.

It is estimated that upgrading the insulation of these houses to achieve an EPC ‘C’ rating would reduce the country’s entire gas demand by 20% (not to mention household energy bills). The climate impact would be even greater in Cornwall, where over 40% of households are not even on the mains gas network, and generally use even more polluting forms of heating, such as oil boilers.

With common illnesses caused by cold homes in the winter currently costing the NHS about £1.4 billion every year, retrofitting homes would have a huge social benefit too.

The UK Green Building Council’s Roadmap suggests that a mass national retrofit programme would create at least 500,000 high skilled jobs across the country and prevent 6,000 avoidable deaths each year from excess cold or heat – as well as hugely reducing average household energy bills.

However, the task ahead is immense, and the National Retrofit Hub is working to bring together all the players involved in order to help meet the scale of the challenge.

If you’re a house owner interested in what you can do to make your home more resilient for the future and reduce its climate impact, check out Cornwall Council’s Homewise Tool for energy and renewables advice tailored to your own home.

Cornwall will be getting its own Home Upgrade Hub early in2026, and one of its key functions will be to offer a tool to help people find reputable traders for retrofit projects.

Despite the importance of retrofitting, it is not a pain-free process…. and this has not been helped by the government frequently changing or cutting the support available, making the future outlook feel very uncertain.

One major obstacle has been the fact that, until recently, goods and services for retrofitting projects had 20% VAT added to them – while new builds were VAT exempt.

This meant people were incentivised to tear down buildingsand start again (despite the huge carbon implications of demolition and re-building), rather than upgrading and adapting the old building to be more climate resilient into the future.

VAT on solar PV and heat pumps was reduced to zero in 2024, but in such a way that it is very difficult to work out the circumstances in which retrofit items are exempt. This means that savings are often still not passed on to customers.

Before undertaking work, check the following points to avoidgetting caught out:

• If you as a householder buy a heat pump direct from a manufacturer or through     a trade outlet, VAT will be charged.
• If your installer purchases it as supplies for a job, no VAT will be charged
• If you have a heat pump fitted and have insulation supplied at the same time, no VAT will be charged on the insulation; in other circumstances insulation will attract VAT. HMRC haven’t explained why this is so.

To find qualified tradespeople to help navigate all this, you can:

• Use the MCS find a heat pump installer tool
• Search for an installer on Which? Trusted Traders
• Contact your energy supplier for advice.

Whether you’ve just taken the very first steps to improve your home’s energy efficiency or you’ve gone the whole hog on insulation, solar PV and a heat pump, Cornwall’s Community Energy Plus would love to hear from you!

By sharing your own experiences could help to encourage and inspire others to start their own retrofit journey too!

Call CEP on 0800 954 1956 or email lowcarbon@cep.org.uk

There were some really disappointing developments in the UK Government’s 2025 budget.

Even though insulation is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, saving households money and delivering more comfortable living conditions, funding for the Great British Insulation Scheme and ECO4, which help support insulation of the country’s least energy-efficient households, has now been ended.

The scheme will come to an end on March 31, 2026, and installers are not accepting any new applications.

This is a major blow, as it will not only leave thousands of households colder and poorer, but will also knock the stuffing out of the home insulation industry.

At the time of writing, the Government has not confirmed what support, if any, will replace this scheme.

When done properly, external wall insulation is the best way of improving a house’s thermal efficiency and energy bills, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

However, shockingly, a recent report has found that over 90% of the 300,000+ external wall insulation installations done under the ECO4 orGBIS schemes were faulty, done by rogue traders, and may need repairing or even replacing.

Anyone affected should contact the Ofgem ECO helpline on0808 169 4447 or ECOhelp@ofgem.gov.uk.You can also contact FuelPoverty Action for support.

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) provides upfront capital grants of up to £7,500 to encourage property owners to replace their gas boilers or other fossil fuel heating systems with more efficient, low carbon heating systems including heat pumps and biomass boilers.

Heat pumps are three times more energy efficient than traditional boilers, meaning they’ll substantially reduce the carbon footprint of your home, and a record 80,000+ of them were sold in 2024, up 51% on the year before.

However, this scheme will be ending on 31 December, 2027. The government says the subsidies have been predominantly going to middle-class households that could have afforded them in any case. 

Heat pump subsidies will in future be accessed via the government’s existing Warm Homes Grant, but this is only available to those receiving certain benefits.

The ending of this scheme is part of the government’s move to reduce overall household electricity bills by cutting the levies that had been added to support energy efficiency measures.

Three-quarters of the Renewables Obligation cost will now be temporarily lifted from household bills, where it had been artificially pushing up the price of the UK’s electricity.

While cheaper electricity may potentially help to encourage wider adoption of heat pumps, there is a big concern that removal of the grant support will be more likely to slow down the transition from gas boilers to heat pumps.

Have you got a heat pump?

Can you help to encourage and inspire others? The Visit aHeat Pump scheme aims to help demystify this technology by enabling people to see and understand how heat pumps work in real people’s homes. Find out more at Visit a heat pump.

Council-backed home improvement loans

If you’re a homeowner or a private landlord, you might be eligible for a loan to fund house repairs and energy-saving improvements. Find out more here: Green Home Improvement Loans - Cornwall Council. 

This is designed to help people who might find it hard to get a loan from a regular bank - such as older people or those on low incomes, or with health issues. The scheme permits borrowing of up to £25,000.

This can be used to fund essential repairs such as roof and structural work, heating and hot water repairs or replacements, and tackling damp and rot in the home or home adaptations and energy efficiency upgrades, such as insulation, heating systems and solar panels.

For the large number of properties with leaky roofs, retrofit can’t be started until remedial works are done. The scheme now also allows for loans to carry out these necessary repairs so that insulation / PV and heat pumps can be installed.

If you own your own home, then you can make your own decisions about retrofitting your property. If you’re renting, you’re often at the mercy of your landlord (who may not want – or be able to afford – to undertake expensive upgrading work).

In Cornwall there is much less social housing than in the rest of the country, with most tenants living in (sometimes very substandard) private rentals.

In theory, this situation is going to change, as the government has mandated that, by 2030, all rental properties must achieve an EPC C rating (more than half of all homes in the UK currently have an EPCrating of D or lower).

This deadline has been extended from an initial target of2025 to give landlords more time to budget and plan for energy improvements such as improved insulation, windows and heat pumps.

And there are plenty of ways to stay warm and reduce emissions without needing to retrofit at all ….

Thanks to our Beyond Bricks presenter, builder Andy Carr, for many of these suggestions 😊

The tip that is missing in the list alongside turning the thermostat down is to reduce the flow rate on the boiler. There is advice on our website on this and government advice now includes this as a recommended step.

• Don’t walk around in your pants in the middle of winter and claim your house is cold. Wear slippers, a dressing gown or any warm clothing. You are in the UK, not in Ibiza ! With the exception of the elderly or vulnerable people, who are advised to keep temps above 16°,cold temperatures won’t actually harm you. It even burns calories. It’s like Ozempic but free and without the side effects! 
• Open your curtains on the south side of the house and keep closed to the north during the day in winter, this will maximise solar gain. Equally the opposite will help keep temps down in summer…we don’t need AC in the UK.
• Draught stop all your windows and doors. This is up there with loft insulation in terms of priority. 
• Don’t leave doors open longer than necessary when entering or leaving the house, it’s amazing how much heat can be lost in a matter of seconds. 
• If you have a porch or inner door, use it, close the inner door before opening the outer… those old schoolhouse builders knew their stuff. 
• Many people actively switch their heating on and off to try to save money. However, if a house is allowed to get cold the boiler has to work harder to get rooms back up to a comfortable temperature. This also isn’t a good idea if you’re using smart thermostats that allow better matching of heat needs to occupancy.
• This is especially true for heat pumps. They don’t work like a traditional boiler – they need to be left on and use a lower set-back temperature.
• In traditional houses with bedrooms upstairs, heat the most-used rooms downstairs only, the warmth will spread upwards through the house. If your bedroom is still cold, buy an extra duvet or hot water bottle. 
• Turn down your heating by at least one degree and don’t heat rooms you don’t use (but be careful about condensation if you close off rooms or reduce ventilation).
• Install insulation, both in the loft and in cavity walls. You’ll get the easiest bang for your buck by boosting your loft insulation to be at least 27cm thick. 
• If you can’t install double glazing, putting up internal shutters or even a lace curtain at windows can make a big difference to the temperature indoors.
• Another option is to secondary glaze with pre-cut Perspex (which can be cut to order, online) if you can’t change your old windows. The effect will be the same or better at a fraction of the cost. 
• Consider swapping to a renewable energy supplier for your electricity if you can’t install solar panels on your own home. Commercial solar farms tend to be far more efficient, so you’ll have a lower carbon impact per unit of energy you consume. 
• Check on the energy usage of your appliances. For example, a tumble dryer could create more CO2 emissions in a year than a UK tree can absorb in the first 50 years of its lifespan! Alternatives such as air drying clothes or using a dehumidifier (which uses about five times less electricity than a tumble dryer), will not only massively reduce the environmental impact of your laundry – it will also save you money and increase the longevity and quality of your clothes.

Our built environment doesn’t only have a climate and environmental impact in terms of direct carbon emissions.

The UK is already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world – and by clearing woodland and hedgerows, draining marshes, paving over living soil and generally fragmenting habitat, new house building has the potential to do huge damage to the environment, as well as worsening flood risk.

Housing developments are currently required by law to leave nature in a better state than they found them – ensuring a ‘biodiversity net gain’ of at least 10% (although this does not necessarily have to be on the actual site).

Enhancing biodiversity is also really important from a climate perspective, since natural spaces such as woodlands and wetlands are also incredibly important carbon stores.

TheBNG rules only came into force in 2024, but already the government has been consulting on scrapping BNG requirements for small/ minor/ medium and brownfield sites. The consultation response is expected in 2026.

These smaller sites actually account for most developments in the UK, so if this goes through, it would significantly undermine protections for nature – just as BNG is beginning to demonstrate its value.

Small losses add up over time and even small building projects can cause big problems for nearby natural areas or break up the connections between different wildlife habitats.  

In addition, the government is also attempting to push through legislation to make it easier for developers to actually build directly on protected environmental sites.  

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill introduces a mechanism allowing developers to ‘pay to pollute’ valuable ecosystems, sidestepping environmental obligations by paying into a nature restoration fund that would be used at some later date to create environmental improvements elsewhere.

Once this fee is paid, the development can go ahead even if it “inflicts adverse effects on the integrity of a protected site”. The bill contains no requirement for developers to measure what harms are taking place, potentially leading to the loss of irreplaceable habitats.

The bill stems from the government’s promise to streamline the process to build 1.5 million homes and approve 150 major infrastructure projects, in this parliament, boosting economic growth.

However, the claim that nature protections are what is blocking the development of housing is misleading. One of the most serious barriers by far is due to housing developers ‘land banking’ – in other words sitting on sites they own and not developing them. As the housing crisis escalates and the need for homes becomes more desperate, the value of their sites increases. They can then make huge profits by selling the sites on – or by developing the houses much later, when their value will have been significantly pushed up, due to limited supply.

The Royal Horticultural Society’s State of Gardening 2025 report, drawing on AI mapping, found that the UK’s gardens cover an incredible 959,800 hectares (2.37m acres) or 4.6% of the total UK land area. This is an area three times larger than all of the UK’s national nature reserves combined.

The RHS says the UK’s gardens support more than 50 million trees and thousands of species, including approximately half of the country’s butterfly, amphibian and reptile species, as well as more than 40% of bird and mammal species. They also store an estimated 158 million tonnes of carbon.

With such huge threats to nature within the government’s drive to develop, everybody with a garden can do a lot to help support natural habitats and wildlife. The combined impact could be extraordinary.

Sadly, however, a lot of our gardens have been becoming less, not more, wildlife friendly. Some 42% of all domestic garden space is now paved over, increasing flood risk, while artificial grass covers an area of the country six times the size of the City of London (nearly half of this plastic grass being in domestic gardens).

Undoing this ‘industrialisation’ of our gardens could prove to be a real lifeline for our declining wildlife.

One key point to be aware of is that, while biodiversity net gain is (currently) a legal requirement that needs to be maintained and protected over time, this obviously won’t necessarily be the case with your garden – if your house is sold, the new owners might decide to dig it all up, nuke it with pesticides or pave the whole thing over.

However, as a nation of animal lovers, nature lovers and gardeners there is definitely huge potential here.

Top tips for climate and wildlife-friendly gardens

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has loads of great advice about how to turn your garden into a space that works for nature – for example by creating ponds, dead wood piles, mini meadows, or introducing native plants to feed pollinators. There is loads of information here on creating a wildlife-friendly garden.

• Where possible, replace hard surfaces with grass and plants, allowing rain to soak into the soil and help reduce flood risk.
• Hedges are a better choice of boundary for wildlife than fences or walls as they don’t just provide food and habitat, but also absorb water and CO₂. They also allow wildlife to move about between gardens and other spaces.
• Save water. Collect rainwater all year round in a water butt or better still create a pond to store it – and use it to water your plants in dry spells.  Sprinklers can use as much as 1,000 litres of water an hour! It’s okay for the lawn to go brown, it will recover the next time it rains.
• Using mulch on your plant borders will help to reduce evaporation by up to 75%.
• Create your own compost using any green waste from your garden or vegetables scraps.  If you have to buy compost, insist on peat-free compost. Peat bogs are a huge natural store of carbon (far more so than forests) and yet they’re still being dug up in the UK. This releases huge amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. Check that any plants you buy are also grown in peat free compost.
• Plant more greenery around your house and grow climbers to help cool down external walls. Trees and tall shrubs also have a great shading effect.
• Let your lawn turn into a mini meadow – less mowing for you but fantastic for wildlife, and it lets water soak in better too. Ideally, it’s not just ‘no mowMay’. Don’t mow your lawn until late July, when the flowers you saw in May have actually had a chance to set seed.