A comment in the Sunday Times article about this area being ‘Britain’s House-building Capital’ made me think.

It mentioned that there is something that ‘residents notice about the homes, but struggle to pin down. One calls her home a “doll’s house”; another says it feels “slightly fake”.’

It reminds me of the song released by Pete Seeger; ‘little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.’

The Government requires new homes to be beautiful but doesn’t care if they all look the same and slightly fake.

Older developments (with the exception of new towns like Milton Keynes) tended to be much smaller so it didn’t seem so obvious that all the homes looked very similar.

They have also been adapted over the years so don’t all look the same anymore.

It is so much easier for developers to have a small range of housing designs which meet the minimum space standards defined by the government and all follow a common pattern.

It says something when the government has to issue minimum space standards.

In the brochure of the prospective development at Grove Gateway, it says that the homes will be “designed to be the highest quality and energy efficiency standards”.

Unfortunately, the building regulations don’t require a very high energy efficiency standard yet – they don’t even require homes to be fitted with solar panels or waste water heat recovery systems.

The ‘Future Homes Standard’ (yet to be fully defined) is supposed to be mandatory in 2025 with homes built from 2025 producing 75-80% less carbon emissions than homes built under the current Building Regulations.

Of course, any existing homes, including those being built now, will need to be retro-fitted to reduce our carbon footprint.

To ensure that a heat pump can provide enough energy to heat an existing home, it may be necessary to put in underfloor heating, replace windows and increase insulation, all of which costs money.

Even the government admits that for new domestic buildings, developers have few incentives to build better performing buildings, as they do not enjoy the benefits of lower energy bills.

The government also suggests that when the new regulations come into effect there will be arrangements to allow building work started in the first 12 months to be done to previous standards, so we can expect lots of homes to be started (but not necessarily finished) so that they won’t have to meet the new standards.