As the UK grapples with increasing pressures on housing, infrastructure, and our social services, we find ourselves at a critical juncture. The recent delay to the Warm Homes Plan (WHP) and the new carbon budget underscore the need to reconsider how we build and maintain our homes.

By revisiting our home standards, we can more effectively tackle climate risks and the issues Britain faces of affordability, overcrowding, and safety. Demographic shifts, including an aging population, high energy costs, and more extreme climate conditions, mean our housing needs to work harder than ever to deliver for residents across the UK.

Despite designing new homes and new towns from scratch, which allows us to integrate design strategies to tackle these issues, there remains the 95% of existing homes (based on the government’s aim of 1.5 million new homes and the latest census data of 28 million homes) that need to be made future-fit. Even if some of these homes have been built to recent standards or recently retrofitted, the vast majority have not been built to meet our current challenges and will require some form of upgrade.