Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#84 - Sarah Daly: Building Better: The Future of Sustainable Housing and Healthy Buildings
The gap between what we know and what we build has never been more troubling. While we have centuries of construction knowledge at our fingertips, today's housing often fails at the most fundamental levels of health, comfort, and efficiency.
Sarah Daly, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Sustainable Communities at Agile Homes, brings a refreshing perspective to this challenge. With her extensive background spanning sustainability, communications, and strategic leadership, Sarah cuts through the noise to address why our approach to sustainable housing needs radical reinvention.
"Words like sustainability and eco have been hijacked and weaponized," Sarah explains, pointing to how terminology has become a barrier rather than a bridge to understanding. The conversation explores how we've reached a critical juncture where the housing crisis pushes quantity over quality, creating homes that actively harm occupants through poor indoor air quality and substandard construction.
The discussion delves into the alarming reality that most new housing fails to meet even basic performance standards, with up to 80% of buildings showing significant non-compliance. Sarah reveals how developers "game the system," knowing they can often evade responsibility once properties change hands. "You've got more consumer rights buying a cheese sandwich in a supermarket than spending hundreds of thousands on a house," she notes pointedly.
What makes this conversation truly powerful is Sarah's pragmatic vision for change. Now working at "the pointy end of the spear" with Agile Homes, she demonstrates how building to Passive House standards should simply be the baseline, not an aspirational goal. Through community-based transformation projects, needs-led design, and a focus on long-term value rather than short-term costs, Sarah illustrates a pathway forward that prioritises human outcomes alongside environmental goals.
Sarah Daly - LinkedIn
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Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. We already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Sarah Daly, head of Strategic Partnerships and Sustainable Communities at Agile Homes and longstanding influencer in sustainability more broadly. Sarah doesn't really need an introduction, but I suppose for the few that don't know her, she has been an Associate Director of Sustainability with Turner Townsend, editor at Ocean Media Group, sustainable Strategist, tedx and much, much more.
Simon:This was a conversation about where does sustainability go from here, beyond the abstract conversation on environmentalism, to tangible human-centered and business-centered benefits. Sarah provides real insights here with a no-nonsense approach to what good can look like and perhaps some lessons for air quality on fighting the right battles. I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. It was one I was really looking forward to and took us a while to set up, so I was really pleased that Sarah was up in Manchester a few weeks ago at the housing conference and we were able to sit down and have a chat. Don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.
Simon:This is a conversation with Sarah Daly, so I suppose that the at the base of all of this is a challenge not just in the uk but pretty much everywhere.
Simon:Really, to be honest, is this there seems to me, anyway, that there's these three profound pillars or challenges in and here we're talking predominantly about housing, but it probably extends beyond that as well where we have this crisis in the delivery of construction. There's a massive demand for housing, none more so than social housing. In the UK we stopped building social housing, um a long time ago. We've got a deep public health crisis, often driven by inequality and lack of affordable housing and good quality housing, um, and we've got this continuing drive for sustainability and decarbonization, and it's that nexus, that triple nexus, if you like that presents a really interesting frame to kind of use sustainability. So I know you've spoken about this before it. It seems to me that we need to create this new narrative. We're at this point where the vanilla tropes of what sustainability is and environmentalism is has somehow got to got to be reframed. So it means something to humans, to people and to business if we're going to genuinely drive sustainable construction forward, specifically sustainable housing. Somehow this needs a rework definitely right.
Simon:So perhaps let's start there, like how, in that nexus, how do we start to reimagine as a sector and as the built environment housing in 2025?
Sarah:I. It shouldn't be complicated, should it? Because we've got, you know, hundreds of years of experience of building houses, and yet you go back hundreds of years, years ago I used to live in a house that was 350 years old, that was built from. You know pretty much. You know sticks and wattle and daub and you know a few bricks and you just think you know. Even then, somebody understood orientation, somebody understood about. You know small window size. You know to reduce solar gain, what there seemed to be almost like an inherent knowledge of the fundamental physics of buildings and making buildings warmer or cooler, or you know, having wanted to do it, um, so I think that's quite an interesting thing as well.
Sarah:What's happened along the line that we've lost some of those fundamentals? But I think I mean, you're absolutely right, the lexicon is not fit for purpose. So it's really hard to communicate with people. Words like sustainability and eco and environmentalism have been hijacked and weaponized. That's not helpful. I don't think there's anybody who would not want a healthy home to live in. Why would you not want to live in a healthy home, with the average person who has perhaps been exposed to red top newspapers talking about you know net zero crap and the other sort of phrases that get used around it. People think it's a bandwagon that they've got to join and they don't understand how it could relate to them.
Sarah:Most people have no idea that they are probably being slowly poisoned by their own indoor air quality or that it's exacerbating health conditions. You know, when I was at school, I think there might have been one child in the school with asthma, possibly two. Now half the class will have asthma. That's obviously, you know, a mix of indoor and outdoor air quality issues. But also, as houses are being built, not necessarily perfectly but to higher specifications, then you're getting people effectively in airtight environments where they're trapped with VOCs. And you know, again, the off-gassing from MDF and paints and other materials. It's, you know, it's killing people and they have no idea because it just, you know, happens silently. They don't really understand what any of that stuff means and in a way, nor should they. But then why isn't there a cul, a recall on those cars and they'd have to be retrofitted and corrected? There isn't that in housing. Perhaps there will be a little bit more with AWAB's law, but again, that is seen to be something that's perhaps more to do with older stock than newer stock.
Sarah:It's so multi-layered and so complex, but I think part of what I'd like to see, and I started life in communication as opposed to sustainability, but I've pulled those two areas together and for me it's all about trying to make what can be quite technical and dry subjects accessible to everybody, because if people understand what the benefits are to them, they're more likely to demand higher standards. And at the moment I think, sadly, national house builders can get away with building stuff that isn't fit for purpose, because they're dealing with an audience who don't really know what fit for purpose looks like. In social housing it's slightly more complicated because I think the sector has been de-skilled so much over the years. I had a really interesting conversation this morning with the head of assets from one of the largest RPs in the UK and he was saying that again, that sort of sense of what the development teams are building and acquiring and how that is going to impact on the asset management team over time is a real issue.
Sarah:You know they've you've got people who are driven to get units and they're talking about units and roofs over people's heads to try and alleviate the housing crisis but at the same time, we haven't got the right management of the process so that we know we're delivering homes to the quality they need to be delivered to. So there's compromises all over the place that shouldn't be there and that obviously feeds into the retrofit funnel and it also feeds into the health and wellbeing funnel, which then has an impact on everything else educational outcomes, crime figures, obviously NHS and health impacts. We've got so many things there which, you look at it from a common sense point of view, none of those issues should be there, but it all comes down to how we set an agreed level of standards and how we get that communication across at all levels of the industry.
Simon:That's really interesting, and there's a couple of things I'd like to unpack a little bit there. One of them is and you said something that I find myself saying quite a bit and that's when we reflect on construction of years gone by. On one side of me we tend to view historically, construction with a little bit of rose-tinted glasses, sometimes right, and in some cases rightly so. There's some of like we're in a beautiful building here today. This kind of a building would never be built today.
Simon:I was working with a local housing authority in Ireland last year who were dealing with stone cottages on the west coast of Ireland and to their surprise they were achieving airtightness levels of below three levels of below three because you didn't get to build houses on the west coast of island if you didn't appreciate how to keep the drafts out right. So we were clearly capable of building both beautiful and very functional buildings throughout the centuries, and construction has been a very conservative sector. It moves very slowly and rightly it was often done by passing skills and trades down the line. So part of me thinks a lot of the problems that we have is the rapid pace of change that we see and demand for housing that we have now that the sector just hasn't been able to keep up and there's a lot of unintended consequences baked into the decisions that we're making. That probably didn't happen centuries ago, like it moved slow enough that those iterations had time that's a really good observation actually.
Sarah:Yeah, and the housing crisis of anything, and obviously there are housing crises um in virtually every um country in the world at the moment. Whether it's a developed or developing country, everyone's facing the same issues. So population explosion is part of it and obviously, you know, family breakdown and other things that just require more independent units of housing are all contributing. But actually I always come from the point of view that house is it gets viewed as an asset in terms of something that's investable, but at the end of the day, it's a basic human right. You know, to have an abode is actually a basic human right, but also to have a house or a home that is actually fit for purpose for your life at that particular point in time is also really important. Again, I've just come out of a really interesting discussion at the housing conference I've been at, which is about needs-led design, and that's something I'm absolutely passionate about that.
Sarah:We've ended up in a situation particularly with, I suppose, a market in the UK that's very much led by volume national house builders. They think in terms of one, two, three, four bedroom units. But actually when you look at people living in those homes, and particularly in social housing, where nearly 50% of people in social homes will have some sort of particular need. So it could be multi-generational, it could be people who've left care, people who've left prison, it could be a divorced couple, single parents, it could be people with disabilities, people with mental health issues or combinations of any of those, and actually they don't neatly fit into something that is described as having one, two, three or four bedrooms. The multi-generational ones are really interesting one at the moment because in social housing that leads to an awful lot of over-occupancy and that leads to obviously damper mould and other issues from over-occupancy. But there aren't really many people designing multi-generational homes.
Sarah:So what happens is under a Section 106 agreement with the local authority, you might get a pair of semi-detached properties that a registered provider, social landlord, will then knock together. I heard a story recently that one had spent £80,000 basically on two brand new semis knocking them together to make enough bedrooms for a family that had three couples and then a number of children living in that household as a sort of multi-generational unit. So again, if you think about what happens in standard house types is generally it's assumed there will be a couple who will have the master bedroom and then there'll be bedrooms that other children go in, and maybe there's this vision that it's parents and 2.4 children or whatever the average is. But actually these children start growing. You know, when my son was 16, he was six foot four. You know he wasn't going to fit in a single bed in a box room if that was the room that was allocated, you know, to him in that house and the risk there is.
Simon:Don't you think it's just social housing as well? You know, yeah, by the renting sector we also have very sedentary. Do you have that? That that split incentive dynamic as well to add to it? So they're this kind of building housing that's fit for purpose, is fit for people, it's not just an asset for delivery, but that's house building, absolutely very different from each other, can't they?
Sarah:yeah, and I think the panic that's setting in at the moment is just we just need to get more roofs over people's heads, because there are obviously a lot of people in emergency and temporary accommodation. So we've got to be really careful that there isn't a knee-jerk to that and then we throw everything else out the window because it's just let's just build more houses. And what worries me at the moment is that I'm not seeing that intelligent process that we need to go through. Where we're doing on a regional level and again, it doesn't really matter which country you're talking about, but there's a lot of public land that's available in most places.
Sarah:Public land should be brought forward, that we should be building high quality, sustainable homes that we know. Tick all the boxes that need to be ticked. We shouldn't be waiting for AWAB's law to say that we've got to remove damper mould from properties. We shouldn't be waiting for Grenfell to say that we should have properties that aren't going to combust. I mean all of these things. A tragedy then forces um and again, particularly in social housing, what is deemed to be a task force response to something, so it looks like something's being done, but that then splits down how appropriate the response is you know, the siloed response often costs a lot more than actually taking a comprehensive view.
Simon:Yeah, and that risk that housing organisations are baking into their structures can be profoundly different from region to region. You know, I work with one housing authority up in Scotland who's actually shrinking. Their demand for housing is going down because they have an ageing stock profile and a demographic that's effectively leaving the region because of lack of work. Yes, in Ireland where I live, the six big housing providers social housing providers effectively have a mandate to double their size in the next five to ten years. That means in ten years 75% of the properties that they're sitting on they would have purchased in that kind of preceding five-year period. So they're baking in enormous risk into their portfolio.
Sarah:You were talking about the asset managers. It's just a retrofit funnel, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, you're just pouring more into the retrofit funnel that will need to be sorted out at a later date. Get it right now.
Simon:And I remember jokes back 10 years ago where we were saying you know, at some point we're going to be retrofitting 1990s houses and people laughing, and what are we doing now?
Sarah:I know and newer than that. And in fact again I was talking to an asset director who was saying of their 12 worst properties, seven of those have been acquired in the last 10 years under Section 106 agreements. And what happens with those agreements from a UK perspective is, once that transaction has occurred, the developer has no further responsibility for that. The liability passes to the social landlord, and that's scurrilous. The fact that that happens anyway is terrible. There's no you know that they should have to warranty the buildings. They know they don't have to. So therefore I'm not, you know, suggesting that they deliberately, you know, create buildings that are going to underperform. But there is a lack of diligence there because the scrutiny is lacking. And that happens in the private market as well. That developers know that.
Sarah:And again I hate to say this, but I heard it from the horse's mouth, from a sales director of a national house builder in an unguarded moment who probably shouldn't have shared this. But basically they said if they can get away with um customers who've complained about defects in a property, if they can hold them off for two years, the person is so stressed and disenchanted by the end of two years they probably put the house back on the market again. Whoever's buying it won't get a survey, because why would you with a two-year-old property? When they occupy the house, if there is anything wrong with it, they just think, oh well, you know that's not quite as it should be and they pay for it to be done and the developer effectively then loses liability. People never go back to the developer after the first person who's bought it, and they know that is liability. People never go back to the developer after the first person who's bought it, and they know that.
Sarah:So they're gaming the system to say, well, we can get away with. You know there's almost no scrutiny. You know we've de-skilled our local authorities. We've got very few building inspectors who know what they're looking at, even if they are doing the right level of inspection. There's clusters of properties where one will have an air tightness test and then it kind of the certificate passes on to. You know, the other properties, all of that it's ridden with with loopholes and ways that that mean that we're creating housing that is just not fit for purpose, whether it's social housing or private yeah, and people might think might think that these are superlatives, but they're really not.
Simon:I was talking to Nathan Wood yesterday on the podcast and he's in and out looking at the ventilation side of this and we know every time you look at this independently, the level of non-compliance so even meeting minimum standards that the level of non-compliance out there across all of Europe this isn't uniquely a UK problem is in the order of magnitude of 75-80% typically, like that's profoundly shocking that that's happening, that we can deliver buildings and four out of five of every property is missing the mark by a significant margin.
Sarah:And this is people's long-term health, long term health and well-being and also the most significant investment they or a social landlord will be making. You know, for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a property, as I always say, you've got you've got more consumer rights buying a cheese sandwich in a supermarket and being able to take it back and get a refund. You can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a house. You can't hand it back and say I don't want this or I want a refund. You're contractually obliged to keep that property and deal with it and that is horrendous. Again, the loopholes around that really need to be dealt with. It's a consumer rights issue on one side that leads into significant other issues and where you've got stock transfer at a social housing level. Again, you know there's government grant in there, which is public money. You know there's millions of pounds going into subsidies that should have more accountability.
Simon:It's a public purse. It is, yeah, I profoundly not getting what we're paying for, which is a public purse issue. Like we're moving into this era now, where data is pouring out of buildings in a way that it never has done whether that's online heat pumps, smart thermostats, switchy, eco-type devices, you name it Like we're seeing buildings through a lens like we've never seen them before Smart devices and stupid buildings.
Simon:Yeah, but you run out of road pretty quickly, don't you? As a developer, because you then start being, or as any provider of housing at any level, you start being held accountable for the ongoing performance of that building. In much the same way, when you buy a car, we understand how those cars perform long term. You start to see league tables and public available information about performance and reliability and all of these things.
Sarah:that's kind of where we're heading with with housing and real estate in general, and I think that that could be a profound change in narrative as we go forward and in fact actually it's even worse than that in some respects, because I think I was reading the other day that the average SAP of a new build APC level is 81, which puts it at a low B. Now a lot of house builders are actually saying they're building A's or high B's and in fact that's the declared SAP level. The as-built performance is significantly lower than that. So we're bringing forward brand new homes, some of which aren't even actually reaching a C. So that's mis-selling. It's mis-selling.
Simon:It becomes a consumer protection issue yeah, and again that that gives, I know that gives the developers the willies, because they are, you know, you get, you know, particularly pernicious whatsapp groups being set up. People say, hey look, I invested in an a-rated home and this clearly is not an A, and before that would have gone down to oh, it's how you're using the property. But now it's like no, look, the data is showing that this is the amount of energy that's being consumed, this is the amount of energy that's going in. This is not performing the way it has advertised. That's a profound challenge, isn't it, to the sector, because it has to start standing over those performance values.
Sarah:Indeed, and in fact I spoke to somebody a couple of years ago, a friend who was buying a property off a plan and obviously hugely excited about it First time she'd ever had a new build property and I said, if I could just give you one piece of advice, get a survey before you accept practical completion on the property. She said why would I do that? And I said because you need somebody independent to identify the snags or performance issues or anything else. So you have it documented from the moment before you've occupied the property. And she decided not to do it. What happened?
Sarah:Huge catalogue of issues afterwards running battle with the developer to put things right and she didn't have that document.
Sarah:Now, you shouldn't need that for a start. But actually if you haven't got something like that, you've barely got a leg to stand on, because, I mean, some defects obviously can be proven, but other things, if somebody's going to come back and say it's the way you've lived in the property, you know if you've got damp, mold, and they're going to say it's because of you, know you're hanging out your laundry inside or whatever it is, they're going to blame you. For it's very difficult then to have the investigations that might be done to prove that I don't think coal bridging was the cause of it and and it's actually a quality issue not an occupancy issue. So it's all of that sort of stuff again. You know your average person is not even going to know to ask those questions. You know they might get a bit disgruntled about a kitchen cupboard that's, you know, hanging on a wonky hinge or something, those sorts of things. But they're not going to know what's under the skin of the building because of the way it's been constructed.
Simon:While I have you, I just want to briefly talk to you about Ultra Protect, a partner of this podcast. Look, they're not here by accident. Like the podcast, they are passionate about driving changes in our indoor environment and are an all-round great company to deal with. They have years of experience in the industry and a team of people I have leaned on on many an occasion for advice and insight. From continuously tracking air quality to specific sampling, they analyze and provide actionable insights for the built environment. Specializing in dust management, they provide amazing products and services that minimize risk and improve environments, from construction sites to offices, to manufacturing settings, through to solutions around ventilation aimed at improving the environment in the long term. It's a company well worth checking out. There are links in the show notes and on Air Quality Matters sites and, of course, at Ultra Protect UK.
Simon:Now back to the podcast. Do you worry that the conversation around sustainable, healthy homes and communities we've so profoundly missed the mark previously easier or less complicated? In fact, it's got far more complicated as we've started to understand the nuances of circularity and embodied carbon and scope three emissions and, you know, started to think in a much more holistic way about what embodied carbon and carbon emissions actually means. Just to take one example, never mind the complexities of air quality or anything else, never mind the complexities of air quality or anything else. If we, if we've been so poor at achieving even just basic primary energy use targets within dwellings, does it concern you, as as the as the the complexity is increased, that we're just gonna?
Sarah:there's just more places to hide, to miss the mark yeah, I, I do, and I think again, it's very nuanced because there's so many different factors at play. But if you, if you look at the miss and disinformation that is now obviously very open, particularly with sort of changes in in in the us and how that's sort of creeping into the narrative across the uk and Europe and many other countries I hate to talk about wings of politics, but obviously it is generally a right wing, anti net zero trope and the whole point around that is that people are being hoodwinked. It's all a bit of a con, it's all you know. They're a bested interest trying to make money. It's exactly the opposite of the reality. Interest trying to make money it's exactly the opposite of the reality.
Sarah:And I think we start then getting into really difficult situations because there are people who say, well, why do I need to upgrade my home? It's only because somebody else is trying to make money out of me. So they don't necessarily see it as something that's going to add value to their home, make it healthier and basically be a good thing to do for the national housing stock. You know, we know in the UK we've got the worst housing stock in Europe. I mean it's just abysmal how poor our stock is and how huge the challenge is to actually, because of, again, the fact that we've got social housing, private rented and owner occupied all of those groups need completely different communications in order to get the right levels of understanding. Um and but you would hope and again, if you look at countries that are more advanced in in these areas that there is just a natural, natural national understanding of what a good home is, and we just don't have that in the UK.
Simon:Yeah. So on that, because it kind of completes that first question in a way, that this kind of reframing that's required has to happen in the context of the global economic both political frame and economic frame, which is profoundly more difficult than it was a few years ago just goes to show, actually, how delicate a thread we hang by at any time that the erosion of sustainability in the US is frightening. I'm involved in a couple of international organizations and it's incredible how fast um studies and projects are having to work through every line of every document to make sure sustainability or dei or anything that looks about equity is anywhere in that document, for for risk of it just being pulled in the us, you know, and all projects around science around the built environment are just being pulled in the US, you know, and all projects around science around the built environment are just being pulled left, right and centre. It just goes to show how on a fine balance.
Sarah:And that came from nowhere, didn't it? None of us expected that.
Simon:Yeah, none of that kind of veracity. So, but you know, even as I sit here you know, sit here with you today, and I've been involved in this industry for a long time, as I know you have I struggle to frame what this new narrative should be. Where's that going to come from? Like, where does this? Because it needs to be directed in some way, because the way you build you know you're from comms as I am the way you build you know you're from comms as I am, the way you build a narrative is through consistency, you know, and consistency both in frequency, but consistency both in language and terminology and how you set things. That doesn't happen by accident. So it's got to come from somewhere. And at the moment I look around and I'm not sure where that comes from. Not at a complete level, not from the top of the pyramid down.
Sarah:Yeah.
Simon:So do you have any sense of how we build a global or national narrative for what the new sustainability is, what good building looks like?
Sarah:Yeah, well, yeah, I think I do. So I think there's a few things We've now got to perhaps start using slightly different words. But again, I was talking to somebody from the Healthy Homes Hub yesterday and saying even the word healthy is a tricky one. Because, again, going back to this thing, do people know what a healthy home means? We had all sorts of movements away from low carbon and net zero to talk about warm homes. Well, warm homes are great until you get a heat wave in the summer and then actually, people don't want a warm home. That's exactly what they don't want. So we've got to be really careful with which words we try and use and what the inference of them is. Affordability gets used a lot because it's about you know how you can make your home comfortable and affordable. But again, there are lots of people who are in high rent areas and their house is anything but affordable for all sorts of economic reasons. So you start ending up getting yourself into real rabbit holes of very complex comprehension, really, I suppose, of what you're trying to get at.
Sarah:What I really liked that seemed to have happened a few years ago and it probably, to be fair, started with David Cameron coming in saying he was going to have the greenest government ever. And then, within a couple of years, he did a complete U-turn. And again I've had conversations with directors from national house builders. One in particular said to me one day the code for sustainable homes isn't going to happen. We will make sure it doesn't happen. We don't want it, we're not interested in it at all. We don't want to build sustainable homes, we just want to build what we build. He was very frank about it, laughing his head off that anybody who had a notion that we were going to end up with legislation that was going to enforce the quality of homes that were required or the performance for homes that were required, he just thought yeah, you ring Cloud, cook you land. Yeah, this isn't going to happen. And I thought thought, of course it is. There's a commitment made to it. We all know what the progression is going to be through the codes and there will be this natural arrival in 2016 and we'll have code six homes and and it will be normalized after that.
Sarah:And then, when the reversal came in it, it did become a race to the bottom again, because it was almost like all bets were off. You can just just build what you want to build and, and you know, and again, gain the system, play it, you know, say it's got a higher epc if you want, nobody's really going to check. So we've lost all those checks and balances in the system. But at the point at which we've been talking about having um, higher performance homes, everyone in the public arena was was all for it.
Sarah:There was a sense that whatever we were going to be building would actually be um, you know, clean, green, cheaper to run homes was appealing to the national psyche, I suppose, and often references to how great homes are in Scandinavia and you know, and everybody liked the idea that we were going to be doing things better. And then when, when the narrative got hijacked and when it started reversing into this idea that it's all about um again, hoodwinking people into thinking that a higher performing home is going to be better bought than when, actually their perception now is it's just going to cost more, but they can't understand why it would be better for them. That's where we've gone into this reversal.
Simon:But you can understand that some degree. I mean you know the residents, that the public pick up over things like, for example, net zero. In part is borne out because even the experts can't agree what net zero actually means. You know that there's a, that you know you get caught in the scientific and engineering discussions about the particulars of what a net zero goal really is and should be and isn't, and that the, the, the public, are looking at those discussions and then that you've got the naysayers then sowing. You know doubt is our weapon and all of a sudden it is a confusing space. Somebody said something. Go on.
Sarah:Well, I was just going to say actually it was interesting I was working on a project last year which was a net zero neighbourhood project. So again it's got the net zero words in there you've got to be careful with. But actually, if you break it down, it was about retrofitting existing properties so that they were going to be and in fact it wasn't just, it was a fabric first approach. They were going to be significant improvements to the streetscape based on improving what were pretty grotty looking buildings, lots of green space around they had little sort of squares and bits of woodland and whatever around, which were all going to be enhanced as well. Transport and infrastructure improvements, a really comprehensive area-based approach to saying what do we need to do to uplift this community? And when you get projects like that that are really transformative. So somebody walking through that area two years ago would have seen a very grotty, down-at-heel area, predominantly with people on minimum wage or economically inactive or whatever categories you'd want to put them in, but a pretty sort of poor community area. And then coming back into that area two or three years later and all the houses, you know they've all got new facades they've got, you know, there's electric power points. There's, you know, much better connectivity with bus services, a really comprehensive re-evaluation of what that community could be. Now, when you get into that sort of level, you don't have to call it sustainable or net zero or whatever. You're just talking about better homes for people that will obviously have um, you know, be more affordable for them to run from an energy point of view, that you're improving people's chances of being able to get to other places in order to get perhaps work of higher value than the work that they've been doing.
Sarah:There's all sorts of ways, and the evidence shows so clearly that things like educational outcomes improve exponentially with better housing, crime rates go down, and even for the social landlords um, again, I was doing some work with one when I was with an organization called sustainable homes a few years ago and we did an analysis on the correlation between uh tenants defaulting on their rents or getting into any difficulties and the epc of the property, and it wasn't because they were bad tenants, but the poorer the property they were in, the more discontent or ill or whatever they were, and therefore it was more likely that they would not look after the property well, and when the property was void, the landlord would then have to spend considerably more on it to get it back upgraded and into use again.
Sarah:But what they did as well, at the same time as they said right, we're going to take those people out of those really horrible homes and put them into a nice home and actually all of their outcomes are better. They looked after the property better because they had pride in it. They were much more likely to stay in employment and, you know, their mental outlook was better. Any mental illness aside, their actual positivity and outlook and everything else increased with that. So we know the evidence is all there that you can make these transformative differences and when you start doing those, that has deep impact.
Simon:Yeah, and I like what you said about this, this kind of localization and community, like maybe we overcomplicate this sometimes that we don't need to find a way of describing it, we need to show it and we show it very well.
Simon:When you see these profound changes to a community, you know, at the end of the day you can drive down most of middle england and, yes, there's, you know, an increased amount of solar panels and there's an increased amount of heat pumps in people's back gardens that you can't see, and then you won't see the insulation on the outside of most walls, like it's invisible. Sustainability, to the large part is invisible. But like you go to these amazing communities, not just in england but copenhagen and austria and switzerland, all over the place, and you always come back from those places with with a shock and awe that like that, these places are incredible, that you can create these community environments, these sustainable. I was in nantes, there in france, and it was an old industrial town and they've totally transformed what was an industrial dock area. It's still urban, it's still got large concrete pads where dock boats were being built, but they've transformed the space into a community environment and the place is flourishing.
Sarah:And in fact I've got another really interesting example. We're in Manchester now and some years ago there was again a massive retrofit project done on a block for Manchester One or One Manchester, whichever way round it was yeah, and basically this was again really poor block that was, you know, possibly going to be just demolished. That was possibly going to be just demolished and the residents in the block most of them actually wanted to keep it and the consultation was basically about whether or not they would want to be moved somewhere else and then potentially move back if there was a rebuild or whether they were going to retrofit. And the decision was made to retrofit the block. But it actually went from the point of that particular block and it was actually studied a longitudinal study on the occupants of that particular development. They also sort of created some garden areas and the residents were required to manage that. So it wasn't somebody else doing it, it was their project. And the other thing that happened was that they ended up moving from a situation on completion where it all looked absolutely fabulous at the end, where there was a waiting list from people wanting to get into that development as opposed to people wanting to get out of the development if they weren't fully committed to it.
Sarah:So it's about transforming existing assets, which obviously is less carbon intensive than knocking down and rebuilding.
Sarah:So that sort of regeneration of areas and keeping communities together is vitally important. And even if communities are troublesome in terms of you know, or gangs and those sorts of things, again, once those transformations happen a lot of those issues can be alleviated or it becomes easier to manage them. And this is not sort of utopian thinking that you're suddenly going to wipe out all the issues, but it does make such a difference the sense of community a positive community, it can be regenerated from negative community, um, so I think that's really important. The other factor that I think is missing, certainly in the uk, is that social housing is pretty much what the people at the bottom of the rung get, and actually that doesn't happen in other countries. And in other countries where you've got, you know, a mix of, you know, young professionals and all sorts of people who actually are quite happy to live in social housing for their life, you know it's not somewhere that they fall back on as a safety net.
Simon:Don't you think those lines are much more blurred in other countries? The difference between social housing and private rented and owner occupied. There's a lot more crossover because you get landlords that are mandated to rent for the lifetime of the renter and things like that. So what's the difference between that and social housing? Those lines become incredibly blurred at that point.
Sarah:But the other thing is, even if you've got a social landlord, in whatever wrapper they are in in their country, if they have responsibility for the asset, but the occupants then form the management company and they vote on what they want to do. Um, I've got a place in france and our sandeek decides. You know, or we vote on things that sandeek bring forward as a management company, on what needs to be done, on that development and the sense. Then if you're all deciding, well, we need some roof repairs, or you know, this needs to be done in the, in the garden or whatever it might be, because you've got a vote, even if everybody doesn't use their vote, the ability is there to have a voice and actually that then creates that, that community engagement. If everything comes back to the mothership and it's the landlord who's responsible for absolutely everything, there might be, uh, tenant engagements happening along the way.
Sarah:But if there isn't co-responsibility at a street level or block of flats, whatever it might, and if you haven't got that mix of people within the tenancy, I think you lose the real opportunity to get collective responsibility and collective positive behaviours happening.
Sarah:And also there's a huge benefit in cross-subsidy because if you didn't cap social rent at the designated affordability level, you could have young professionals who might otherwise be in private rented basically paying the sort of rent they pay in the private rented sector, but helping to cross-subsidise perhaps people on lower incomes, and then we wouldn't need government grant to fill the gap all the time. You know welfare payments, so there's all sorts of stuff that feels like it's quite logical um learnings that we can take from other places. The reason it's really important is not only in the placemaking side of things and the community side, but also because it just means that there will be more money in the system to do the stuff that isn't being done at the moment or that feels too difficult to do. So I kind of feel like we need a little bit of disruption in there.
Simon:Well, talking of disruption, and what I was fascinated to talk to you about was what takes somebody from consulting and working on sustainability for so long to the pointy end of the spear, now working with agile homes. I've remembered that correctly, so, like you're now at the coalface with an organization who's trying to deliver those sustainable homes what just trying doing?
Simon:doing so. So what? What was it? What is it about Homes that brought you across from what you're working on? Because I imagine that must be incredibly exciting to come from the advisory role. I'm sure you're still in an advisory role within it, but to the pointy end of the spear, actually at delivery, yeah, yeah.
Sarah:I mean it's an interesting one. I've had a very strange career, not at all linear, all the best ones are yeah, exactly, but in all sorts of different roles.
Sarah:You know, from starting off with my own um comms and management consultancy for 20 years, then sort of moving into various roles within the environment. But, interestingly, um craig white, who's the CEO of Agile? He was running white design and architectural practice in Bristol. At the same time I was managing director of an architectural practice into, you know, cutting edge sustainability. So when I was working within that organisation I could see what Craig was doing with his practice and really loved the idea of it. So I was really reinventing what Heath Avery were doing at the time. And that got me really close to understanding not just what happens within the design process because I'm not an architect but understanding really important things like what happens in the process, particularly where you design something that's high performing and then it gets value engineered out by the contractors and diluted along the way because somebody has decided that they want to save money at the capex point, fds and bean counters and people who are really interested in you know what the initial cost of something is as opposed to. So this is very much for retained assets, but you know what the cost is going to be in the long term. And one of the really good examples that happened around that time actually was I'm sorry, I feel like I'm deviating slightly, but it's a really important point I was actually on the board of an FE college college.
Sarah:I was the board sustainability advisor as a governor, and we were building different campuses at the time and, as I'd started as a governor, one had was just coming to completion uh well, just about to go out to tender actually and there were lots of um discussions at board level about the cost of the building and the design had been put together. It wasn't going to be zero carbon, but it wasn't going to be far off. It was going to be a really high performing campus and the decision was made at board. Obviously I was kicking and screaming, but the decision was made at board level to go for the lowest specification that the contractor had recommended in order to save money. So it was going to save several hundred thousand pounds.
Sarah:What happened? The first term that that building was open? We have a really cold winter. The energy bill far exceeded the amount that had been saved by the reduction in the specification and the cost was such a shock to the college that they had to make 10 people redundant to pay for those extra energy bills. I just sat there and went. I obviously didn't communicate to you well enough the fact that you can think that you're being clever at, you know, reducing cost, but if you're going to end up paying a different price along the line, we've really got to get that communication there so, between that and cost of everything and the value, and the value.
Sarah:Yeah, yeah, sure, absolutely. So that that sort of yeah, oscar wilde approach to things is is, you know, very much underpins the way I think about it. But it's also about making sure, again, go back to that communication and language point that you're getting that across. And what I loved about agile is basically what craig had done is pull together his architectural practice and he'd also developed a system called mod cell, which is a panelized system, and pulled that together so effectively. Um, agile is a sort of design and build entity that really understands what needs to happen, whether it's I mean, we operate across all sectors, but I'm obviously mainly focused on housing but the opportunity not only to say these homes will be passive house, they'll be high performance, they'll be high. That is all going to come as standard. Now let's talk about the needs of who's going to go in them and making sure we get, you know, needs-led design so we're not again re-specifying things that that you know again go back to this sort of idea of whether or not it's somebody with mental health issues who might need certain adaptations, or physical health or multi-generational or whatever it might be. Let's get the specification right, get the performance right, all of the things that when I was working in consultancy and leading the comms and engagement and learning and development for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero programmes, that was basically about trying to transform the knowledge base of the asset teams for social landlords and local authority teams who were going to bid for government grant, and what Desnaz realised very early on is that the skill levels were so low that basically, even if they got grant, they wouldn't really know what to do with it. So that's not being disparaging to the people in those departments. They'd never been required before to understand about energy efficiency and everything that goes along with that. So what myself and my team were able to do was curate a whole program that was going to deal with every single facet that they would need to understand and actually, as an example of a programme that worked at speed across a whole sector bear in mind there are several thousand housing providers in the UK we managed to, over a two or three year period, get a significant change in not only the knowledge and capability levels but the capacity of the whole market and pulling through supply chains, and that has been transformative in the sector.
Sarah:So it's still not perfect. There's still a lot of lessons being learned, but the difference between being an asset manager who's I don't know upgrading roofs and windows and doors and refitting kitchens and bathrooms, to move from that into somebody who can actually look at a whole variety. You might have hundreds of different archetypes of buildings in your portfolio, all of which, as individual buildings, will have different sort of whole house design requirements and different occupants and all of those sorts of things. We've now got hundreds of people across the UK who are able to understand, to know what data they need and to analyse that data and actually present it into a programmatic approach to upgrading their properties. And that is phenomenal.
Sarah:I mean the response from the market in terms of meeting that challenge, the market in terms of meeting that challenge. I say it whenever I'm speaking at conferences you lot are bloody amazing, but they are. They just went. Yeah, we know this needs to be done and when we're going to do it and they could have gone all too difficult, too tricky, you know they didn't and and you know being at a housing conference at the moment and being at the awards last night which recognized all sorts of different organisations celebrating, you know, the wins that they've had, it has just been so uplifting, so that's great. But if we go back to the new build side of it, my fear is, if there aren't people like me agitating and disrupting the market, we're just going to be putting more crap into that retrofit funnel and that is not going to help anybody.
Simon:And it was interesting just before I asked the question is the stuff you're doing with Agile. Would you consider that off-site construction? Was it more panelised construction? It's hybrid, really it's hybrid, yeah, okay.
Sarah:Yeah, so it's closed panel again, high performance sort of systems, and then there's traditional skills on site basically to complete, so we can get the building fabric up in a couple of days and then the rest of the magic happens.
Simon:I like the way you just brushed off and of course, it's going to be Passive House, which is great to hear because it just goes to show look, it's a high performance building, like, that's the baseline, like, and so this is the understood level passive house. That's what you get. It's not and I assume you're doing doing that at a competitive level. So like this is just that, this is just the given. There's no excuses for not building a high performance building in 2025.
Sarah:That's kind of your mindset, I guess totally and actually and it always has been to a certain extent, because I can again remember back in my, you know, days working with the architectural practice, that you'd speak to clients who'd say, you know, we've tried this before.
Sarah:But basically what they mean is they've come up with a design and then they've gone to a contractor and they've said can you, can you make this more sustainable? And basically what the contractor has done is, um, it bolted on the eco bling, as I would call it, but they haven't dealt with the, the fabric, and you know so you're always on the back foot and it's always going to look expensive. You know you go there is absolutely if you design correctly in the first place and if you get the thermal mass of the building right and you get all of the. You know we do triple glazing we've got and I should say we don't, unless the client wants it. It's not Passive House certified, we just build to that standard and there can be variations in that. But generally speaking and Craig is absolutely immovable on the idea that we will compromise on the specifications the base specification of the building is sacrosanct because without that everything else falls over once you start watering that down.
Simon:Yeah, that's interesting. You say that about the certification of Passive House. It leads me on to ask. One of the questions I had in mind for you was the where is Passive House's place in 2025? Because you've got people like yourself and organisations like Agile that are so comfortable at the level of Passive House that it becomes a brush-off statement. You just say, oh, and of course, we're building to Passive House levels or standards. It has just become the given. Where do you see the Passive House movement's place now? Because for people like you, it's just a no-brainer, it's a given, you understand it, and so on. Um for the rest, for the rest of construction yeah where does it sit?
Simon:do you think? What's its kind of role or mandate, do you think kind of over the next few years?
Sarah:um, again, it was interesting.
Sarah:Last year I worked on a project again for a housing provider who had Again, it was interesting.
Sarah:Last year I worked on a project again for a housing provider who had set their own standard and so they had been building to certified passive house for all their new builds for a period of time and then had decided that was too expensive, Not because of the building quality per se, but they were just struggling with supply chains, just struggling with supply chains. They had a lot of rural property, small sites on rural locations, and actually getting contractors who could actually deliver to that level in diverse locations was just increasing the cost for them. So that's a different argument in a way. But it brought them to a point where they wanted to look at whether or not they were over-specifying. So they wanted a comparison between building regs, Passive House Standard or their own standard, which was an AECB type standard. So one of my technical colleagues actually did an appraisal. So one of my technical colleagues actually did an appraisal this is before Agile did an appraisal and they actually came up with the fact that their own specification was actually pretty good.
Simon:And that it might not be exactly to Passive House standard, but it was going to deliver a really good home. That's the challenge. Is those kind of all those standards converge there's less daylight between them. Though all those standards converge, there's less daylight between them, it gets you that they lose some of their impact, potentially because they want you know that we were talking about passive house 15, 20 years ago, like a fundamental difference between minimum standards and and passive house standards, that clear blue sky between them. These days, on paper anyway, there's much less of that yeah gap. So it's going to be interesting. We see it's not just passive house. We see it with acb. We see things like energy sprung. People do it for a period of time, get comfortable with those processes and go. Actually, I don't feel I need all of this infrastructure around me. I'm quite now comfortable with the process.
Sarah:Yeah, absolutely yeah I mean, I think you raise an interesting point there which just reminded me of something I used to bang on about a lot actually, which was a lot of. It comes down to the fact that the way we teach construction skills has barely changed in decades. So actually we've got a lot of people in construction who pretty much don't understand the basics that they really should understand. Now part of that is down to, again, very siloed education. So if somebody is a plumber or an electrician or a brickie or a chippy or whatever their role is, that's what they do and that's kind of what they know and understand. And it's like, oh no, don't talk to me about that, that's not what I do. They do and that's kind of what they know and understand. And it's like, oh no, don't talk to me about that, that's not what I do. So and actually I remember hearing some years ago that um, at the same time, energy spawn came into the uh uk supported by an eu fund.
Sarah:Um, ireland did something called quali build. I don't know if you've come across that, but I think the Technical Institute in Dublin had sort of put that together and the idea was that they would look holistically across the construction sector, recognising that a lot of people had gone through apprenticeships and possibly picked up some bad habits along the way, because, you know, that's the way it was all done, this is how we do it, but not necessarily taking them back to a sort of technical level. Other people had had some training but might not have had any retraining or updates. I mean, obviously there's, you know, plumbers and electricians who have mandatory requirements, but other people don't. So you ended up in most countries with a workforce who were required to build something and you'd start talking about things like passive house and they didn't know what the heck you were talking about. Um didn't know what air tightness was, you know, but an electrician wouldn't know that. You know, drilling a hole in the wall is going to puncture the air tightness and you know that is. So there's all these things that were happening every day where you might get certain people who understood what they were doing and then it would all get unraveled because somebody came in and did something after the event and, you know, ruined whatever had been in place.
Sarah:So a lot of that, what quali build seemed to be doing was saying well, we're going to have some modules here and a national register. We can basically say everyone will have the first module, so everybody will know what a good a good building or a good house is. They'll understand the fundamentals of good building or a good house is. They'll understand the fundamentals of good building, physics and whether or not you agree or disagree with passive house or whatever, you should understand the difference between you know fixed windows and MBHR, or you know natural ventilation and crossbends and all those sorts of things, things that I sound like I know about, but I know the terminology. I'm not, I'm not a technical person, but all the stuff that leads to good buildings everybody involved in the process should understand fundamentally. And then there will be things that you need to know to upgrade your own skills yeah, it's interesting.
Simon:I was involved in the development of that actually in Ireland, yeah, and we sat in the room we had, you know, representatives from ventilation industry, from from brick layers, from plumbing, literature, all the different things, and it was really interesting because there's a foundational fundamentals course you go through, which everybody goes through, and we were kind of looking well, which, what kind of levels of skills and what trades would need to do it. And actually when you broke it down, you know people go, what about the wet trades, what about the brick is, and so on. You know when, actually, you know if they see a detail on site that doesn't look right for air tightness membranes, if they don't have that fundamental awareness, yeah, they're not going to spot it and be able to call it.
Simon:So actually it's amazing how much crossover there there is across construction, so it's really interesting to see those. They're all now managed by the what they call the Education Training Board in Ireland.
Simon:We have these centres so we've just developed a ventilation for retrofit course in one of them, in the Leash Offaly Training Board, and we built a cottage inside one of the hangars that this stuff goes in on. Stuff goes in on and we've got a whole range of ventilation systems and things in there that people can experience and work through and know what it's like in real life actually working with these products.
Sarah:And they're brilliant schemes because they're directed at the trades to to upskill them and it was really interesting because after the um, oh golly, what was the report called? Uh?
Simon:which one? From ireland or from no, from the uk, uh, each home counts oh yes, yeah, the bonfield review after the bonfield review.
Sarah:Um, there was again.
Sarah:At that time I was at sustainable homes and we were really pushing and saying, look, we need a quality build style approach in the uk and something that's going to pull together the trades to really understand what to do and actually didn't get picked up and the pushback we had was that the construction trades would see it as an amistate, you know, telling us that we don't know our jobs and that it there'd be too much pushback from the sector.
Sarah:But my understanding is it had the opposite effect in Ireland and that a lot of builders who hadn't had any training for years actually really appreciated having that extra input and the the unintended benefit of it was that actually if somebody was in to fit a kitchen for Mrs Miggins, they would say to. By the way, you know your windows aren't in very good condition. That's going to be causing, you know, a lot of air leakage there. I know Bob down the road who can do your windows for you. Do you want somebody to check your insulation levels? And actually ended up actually creating more confidence with the customer that somebody was just looking out for them and checking what could be, done and actually generated more work for everybody.
Simon:Yeah, it's interesting. As an individual who's straddled both the UK and Ireland quite intently over the years, it's been interesting to see the step change in each country. So we developed something called SR54, which was a standard for retrofit, and that was before PAS 2035, which came out of the Bonfield Review. Now we've done something, so it's really interesting to see the difference. And the challenge of comparing the UK and Ireland is predominantly just scale.
Sarah:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Simon:And you can approach things differently on an island of five and a half million people compared to the UK, so that's the biggest difference.
Sarah:I see a lot of similarities in Scotland, but there's a lot of rural locations in Ireland. It's much more rural and actually that can be harder to reach, can't it? So we've got much more urban focus and actually, if you broke it down to urban areas or you know county levels of things, it's not a difficult thing to do. It just needs to happen.
Simon:Yeah, doesn't it? Just, sarah, I'm conscious of time because I dragged you away from the show. I know you've got a train to catch, so we'll leave it there. We'll try and pick it up again at some point, because I knew we could chat for another hour or so.
Sarah:I'd say without any problem whatsoever.
Simon:Thanks so much for coming and seeing me. It was brilliant to see you.
Sarah:Sorry, I couldn't spend more time with you.
Simon:we'll get you away and onto your train.
Sarah:Oh, thank you.
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