Alex O’dell is vice president, Great Britain and Ireland at Velux. He sat down with Spotlight to discuss how the built environment can affect health, well-being and climate, and how to embed models of best practice into UK housing policy.
Spotlight: Why do you believe the UK has lacked a holistic vision for its built environment, and how has this affected communities?
Alex O’dell: Strategy so far has always seemed to be about hitting volume targets when it comes to housebuilding. That means that broader considerations around well-being and sustainability
take a back seat. That means a lot of communities and a lot of newbuild housing just isn’t hitting high-quality standards. In the past, the government has been slightly tunnel-visioned, with that singular focus on hitting the raw numbers at the lowest price possible.
But having sub-standard housing really affects residents in terms of their well-being, as well as their mental and physical health. There’s a broader social cost that goes with that, for the NHS and a range of government services. Research shows children’s test scores improve when they live in brighter, warmer dwellings with natural daylight and no damp. For adults, there’s fewer sick days and higher productivity.
How can the Labour government draw inspiration from Nordic countries to enhance the UK’s built environment?
We have lacked ambition a little bit previously. If we look at the housing model in Scandinavia we can see some great outcomes. Denmark is the home market for us. We have been involved in a number of initiatives to try and showcase that Nordic paradigm and trumpet its benefits through projects like Living Places Copenhagen – an experimental living environment focused on bringing together investors, architects, engineers and more, to show we don’t need to wait years for healthy and sustainable homes.
To promote these standards in the UK, we took the Future Homes Hub (FHH) to Living Places this summer. The FHH has been asked by the government to pull together housebuilders, architects, experts in the industry to come up with recommendations for how we can achieve better housing standards, and the Living Places visit provided valuable inspiration.
Homes need proper ventilation and to have daylight integrated into their design. We’re trying to show there’s a better way of doing things. You can have collaboration between manufacturers, communities, housing professionals and designers to produce environmentally friendly homes that are energy efficient and that enhance well-being indoors.
It’s about how you prioritise health, sustainability and community in the built environment. It’s got to be scalable and affordable so we can mass produce homes fairly cheaply, but once you work with builders to use the right materials we calculate we could be building houses with around a sixth of the embedded carbon as an average UK house. Building and construction is responsible for around 40 per cent of emissions – cement and steel have a huge footprint – so we have to be conscious of this.
What role does the design of indoor environments play in public health, and how should this influence UK policy?
It’s important we make homes that people want to live in. They need to be well-ventilated. They need good temperatures, good light and a controlled indoor climate. They need to be quiet. We spend 90 per cent of our time indoors. The Town and Country Planning Association says one in ten people live in sub-standard homes. Those people are twice as likely to be
in poor health, costing the NHS and wider society around £18bn every year. A well-designed built environment reduces stress, improves mental health, and it allows you the potential to improve your physical health in many positive ways.
Open, outdoor shared spaces can also do that, while also fostering community and building people-friendly neighbourhoods. These are the kinds of investments in the future that will improve public health and population-level well-being for years to come.
How can the Labour government’s commitment to building 1.5 million new homes be aligned with the goals of sustainability and well-being?
We absolutely welcome the government’s plans to build a lot more homes and also to build a high proportion of affordable housing. That’s absolutely what we need. It can’t be at any cost, though. We need to build the right houses for the future. 1.5 million is going to be a major challenge for the industry. Some of new units and extra space could be achieved with ambitious renovations of existing buildings: new floors and more extensive use of loft spaces. We’ll need the planning arrangements in place, as well as the labour force – but we cannot forget about quality with a relentless focus on quantity. We need to think of the energy, environment and health impacts. We follow a set of principles called the Active House principles with three key metrics to focus on: energy, environment, and indoor climate. Currently, there’s no incentive and no requirement on developers to follow any regulations on daylight or natural ventilation. But they are both key to healthy living in healthy buildings.
The government is trying to create a legacy, to fix a broken housing market in the UK – and that’s excellent, commendable, we are absolutely on board and ready to partner with public bodies, local government, national government and private partners in our sector, in order to make that happen.
But we need to get the balance right. We don’t want a legacy of cramped, disconnected houses full of damp. We need to think about natural daylight, about natural ventilation that aerates the house and keeps it at a good temperature, about acoustics – this is what makes the indoors liveable, and what will go a long way to renewing the country’s housing stock positively for generations to come. That would be an incredibly impressive legacy.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight Housing supplement, published on 29 November 2024.
Related
