The UK Government’s Future Homes Standard 2025 Becomes Mandatory

In 2025, the UK Government’s Future Homes Standard (FHS) will become mandatory. This comes after the previous government consulted on an uplift to energy efficiency standards for new homes in 2020. The initiative aims to decarbonise new-build homes by 75-80% more than the current building regulations. This is part of the push to achieve net zero by 2050, exerting pressure on the government to regulate new builds and the standards they meet. Residential housing currently accounts for around 16% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has made it clear that these emissions must be completely eliminated from housing for the UK to meet net zero by 2050.

The FHS will focus predominantly on improving heating and water efficiency as well as reducing heat waste. This will be through using heat pumps, to be installed within new homes, a type of environmentally friendly technology to replace gas boilers. The FHS would also mean using more high-quality insulation methods, such as triple glazed windows, vacuum insulation and solar panels.

Back in 2021, the Government decided to increase building regulations and standards within the housebuilding industry, aiming to boost energy efficiency. The FHS will be building upon this decision. However, this legislation only requires homes to be ‘zero-carbon ready’. The FHS also omits the mention of solar panelling and the impact on fuel bill costs, instead focusing on minimising upfront capital costs to developers.

There are concerns around embodied carbon not being addressed in the FHS also. Embodied carbon includes the carbon emissions generated by the transportation and haulage of building materials. Despite a zero-carbon ready requirement for new homes, the FHS will not consider the carbon emissions generated from transportation and environmental costs which are incurred over time.

For the industry, the new requirements will mean a short to medium-term financial burden on developers, coupled with more stringent environmental protection measures. Transitional costs are likely to also fall onto businesses and Local Planning Authorities (LPA), who will need to train their employees to become familiar with the new standards and how to apply them. The businesses which need to be aware of the FHS include contractors, architects and energy performance assessors. Over the medium to long term, these extra costs may become factored into house prices and therefore passed onto future homeowners. In the long term, the newly introduced legislation should lower energy bills and increase energy efficiency within homes for consumers.

One of the big questions for developers is whether they can absorb the additional cost impact of adopting the FHS, without it infringing upon their expected housing completions. The Government should look to find the right balance and ensure the FHS compliments their efforts to boost housebuilding across the country. They also need to find a way to further incentivise new developers to the market to take on this cost burden, in addition to other stringent environmental regulations.

The consultation for the FHS closed back in March 2024 and is set to be implemented from this year. It is also understood that there will be either a six or twelve-month transitional period between the laying date of the regulations and publication of the full technical specification and the regulations coming into force, to allow time for the industry to adapt.