Baker Homes Articles

We are pleased to announce that Richard Hill, Executive Director - programmes and deputy chief executive of the HCA will announce this year’s Sustainability Benchmarking results for the Baker Homes Index For Tomorrow (SHIFT).

Diamond Build, one of the UK’s top contractors, has become a principle sponsor of nationwide sustainability initiative, SHIFT.

The Sustainability Consultant Richard Lupo joined UKGBC, Zero Carbon Hub and SHIFT member Peabody Group in a Guardian online Q&A last week. 

Passive housing (or Passivhaus) has become a buzz word in the building industry recently. The German standard for low energy use, low carbon homes has proved a massive success on the continent and has the potential to minimise carbon emissions and all but eliminate heating costs.

H+H UK is Britain’s largest manufacturer of aircrete products and has signed up as an associate sponsor for SHIFT, joining the list of companies already in support of this nationwide sustainability initiative.

The housing industry is eagerly awaiting the results of the Baker Homes Index For Tomorrow (SHIFT), the independent benchmark of environmental sustainability for the industry.

The Mayor of London wants London to be the greenest big city in the world with a thriving low carbon economy and realisation of this vision is set for 2025. It would have given up its dependency on polluting fossil fuels and have the lowest carbon footprint per person to any big city in the world. The Mayor’s vision is supported by the draft document “Climate Change Mitigation and Energy Strategy”. Specifically, the Mayor’s vision includes:

The task group set up by Government to deliver zero carbon homes by 2016, Zero Carbon Hub, has released formal recommendations on carbon compliance. This has some substantial implications for house building performance standards and environmental considerations.

In March 2011 one of the UK’s biggest ever emergency exercises will test our preparedness and emergency services against surface water, river and reservoir failure as well as tidal flooding. How will we do?

We have seen and continue to see a number of changes to our climate which will make weather patterns harder to predict. These changes in the weather pattern may result in torrential rains and long droughts. This is likely to have significant impacts for people that work with buildings as they will need to know what measures are needed to combat bad weather.  In particular homes will heat up, the likelihood of flooding will increase and water shortages will be significantly more likely.