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Sustainable development was brought into the consciousness of many
international policy-makers and multinational corporations in 1987, with
the publication of Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission
on Environment and Development. The Commission’s definition, since widely
adopted, was: "Development which meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Relevance of Sustainability
 A sustainable development not only embraces the concept of sustainability
but is, in itself, a teaching tool for sustainability. Its design
addresses the Triple Bottom Line, namely environmental impacts, social
concerns and economic performance.
Globally, buildings consume large amounts of resources and emit different
types of pollution. It is very crucial that buildings are made sustainable
so as to reduce the damage caused to the environment. The utilization of
resources by buildings and the impact they generate is illustrated in the
diagram below.
Buildings over their life-time impact two main issues i.e. environmental
and socio-economic. Within a sustainable building these impacts will be
reduced substantially.
Environmental impact
Buildings impact the environment during
construction, use and demolition. The major impacts are listed below:
Socio-economic impact
There are many social and economic issues that are
a by-product of the design of the built environment. Sustainable buildings
will attempt to address these issues during the design stage.
Socio-economic impacts include the following:
Access
- Disabled users
- Lifetime homes standards
Heath and Safety
- Structural / Building components condition
- Indoor environmental quality
Community
- Character - compelling physical characteristics establish a sense of
place
- Ownership - an identifiable group that has a sense of pride and
responsibility for a definable space.
- Authenticity - a place that exhibits a genuine ethos of historic or
contemporary meaning or context for its users
- Accommodations - amenities are present that provide for basic human
needs and desires
- Social and Private Space - talk, play, and special events as well as
retreat and solitude are accommodated and encouraged.
Security and crime
- Fire Protection
- Burglary / Vandalism
Acoustic
- Division between units
- Noise pollution from street
Social Interconnectivity
- Extending mix of uses
- Lifelong learning goals
- Raising awareness of energy issues
Public / users amenities
- Children’s play
- Community facilities
- Communal areas – indoor / outdoor
- External landscaping
Anticipating Future Change
- Adaptability for future needs
- Flexible solutions
Building quality
- Condition of existing finishes
- Maintenance regime: strategies for cleaning
Whole Life Cost
- Operational cost
- Maintenance cost
- Profitability
Other sustainability issues
Affordability
The cost of both renting and owning housing in the UK has risen steeply
compared to past levels in this country and relative to housing costs in
other European countries. In part this is a reflection of the housing
shortage discussed above. Government policy aims to make the link between
the availability and location of affordable housing and the prospects for
sustainable communities. High housing costs have a major impact on
people’s ability to choose where they live, and therefore where – and in
some cases whether – they work. On one level the problem affects groups
such as public sector ‘key workers’, especially where they are younger
people wanting to set up home reasonably close to city centre workplaces.
On another level the lack of affordable homes hits people on low incomes
or benefits, whose choice is restricted to poor quality housing in the
private rented sector, or social housing. This reinforces the
concentration of low income groups in certain neighbourhoods – a trend
towards ghettos and enclaves rather than mixed communities. Although rents
in the social sector are likely to be covered by social security, they can
still be high; and the benefit trap means that the higher the rent the
harder it is for a tenant to make the jump from welfare into work.
For tower blocks this means a high preponderance of low income residents.
It also means that landlords and tenants rely on the housing benefit
system to pay the rent
A number of other trends and policy directions affecting social housing
were flagged up in the Housing Green Paper of 2000, now followed up by the
Housing Bill introduced in December 2003.
Stock Transfer
Perhaps the clearest change in the social housing sector is the transfer
of ownership of local authority homes to registered social landlords (RSLs),
usually housing associations. The new owner may be an existing
organisation, such as a housing association which already has homes
elsewhere, or a new body specially set up to take over the transferred
homes. In some cases this may be a tenant management organisation.
Begun by the Conservatives in the late 1980s, stock transfer has been
continued by the Labour government; which confirmed in its policy
statement The Way Forward for Housing (December 2000) its intention to
support transfers of up to 200,000 homes per year. The transfer programme
approved in June 2001 included Birmingham City Council’s entire stock,
passing over around 400 tower blocks. Stock transfer means that many
housing associations are finding themselves taking over responsibilities
for tower blocks for the first time. This makes guidance on good practice
in design, refurbishment and management all the more necessary.
The key rationale for the programme is that once outside public ownership
government borrowing restrictions do not apply. RSLs can therefore raise
loans from banks, building societies and the capital markets. Part of the
loan is used to acquire the properties from the local authority, the
remainder is ploughed into a programme of repairs and improvements to be
carried out in the five years after transfer. Income from rents is used to
fund day-to-day housing services such as repairs and maintenance, and to
service the loan which should be paid off over a 20 – 30 year period.
Years of under-investment have taken their toll on the physical state of
much local authority housing, with many tower blocks in need of
potentially expensive refurbishment. Day-to-day housing management
services are also over-stretched. Stock transfer therefore has strong
attractions as a way to generate the resources needed to carry out
improvements. Over the last few years the government has come to look to
stock transfer to deliver benefits in other areas. Proposals for transfer
must demonstrate how they will provide a better housing management
service; and significantly, there are now strong expectations that housing
associations will create more opportunities for tenants to be involved in
the management of their homes. All transfers require tenant consent, and
the whole stock transfer process requires work to increase tenant
involvement. Government guidelines state that it must ensure effective
participation of tenants at all levels of the transfer organisation.
Allocations policies are, of course, hugely important. Local authorities
retain a duty to maintain their local register of people needing housing,
while housing associations must co-operate with the authority in offering
accommodation to people with priority on the register, and to assist the
council in the discharge of its homelessness functions.
Geography
Geographical variations can be a critical factor affecting the viability
of high-rise refurbishment. There are wide variations in the need for
housing between different parts of the country with the pressure to use
all available housing resources especially intense in London. Other things
being equal high demand provides a good reason not to demolish blocks, and
can help strengthen the business case for refurbishment. However, this
does not always work out in practice, as in the inner London Borough of
Hackney where several tower blocks have been pulled down in the last few
years.
Outside London the housing market has also been buoyant during the late
1990s and early 2000s, notably in parts of the big northern cities; though
there are big differences within cities between the affluent ‘desirable’
areas and less popular neighbourhoods.. However, this trend is not
necessarily linked to demand for social housing. Liverpool has suffered
particularly severely from a long post-industrial decline which has seen a
large drop in the city’s population since World War II. In the early 1990s
the city council’s housing stock was transferred to a Housing Action Trust
(HAT) and one of the decisions that followed was to demolish the majority
of the city’s tower blocks. Those left have benefited from intensive
refurbishment and are now coming under housing association management..
ALMOs
Despite stock transfer, which for all its attractions is politically
controversial and not always the desired way forwards, large numbers of
tower blocks continue to remain in local authority ownership. This may
well mean that they are in a weaker position to access finance for
substantial improvements. However, in 2000 the government created a new
option for financing capital investment in housing that remains in local
authority ownership. The additional money can only be accessed when an
authority has placed its housing management function at ‘arms-length’,
setting up a new organisation (known as an ALMO) to manage its stock
(though ownership and the strategic role remain with the local authority).
To qualify the authority must also have demonstrated high performance
against Best Value housing criteria.
Funding context
The essential question is: “how can improvements be paid for?”. Over the
last 10 years only a small proportion of tower blocks have received
significant improvements. Whether or not a particular tower block can
access funding depends on where it stands in relation to a number of
cross-cutting factors. The government offers three options to councils
wanting substantial additional funding to improve their stock: Arms Length
Management Organisations (ALMOs), Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and
Stock Transfer. All these options involve the local authority divesting
itself of its housing management function.
Some of the ways in which funding can be directed towards physical
improvements are as follows:
Housing Investment Programme
This is the core public spending on upgrading local authority housing
stock – an annual allocation to each council from central government. The
budget has been kept low for at least two decades, and most local
authorities have only had the money to carry out minimal repairs and
improvements.
Stock transfer
As explained above, stock transfer allows investment in housing without
increasing public sector borrowing, through transferring ownership to
housing associations.
Private Finance Initiative
So far as can be ascertained, the PFI to date has been largely used for
new developments.
Arms-Length Management Companies
In certain circumstances the government is now releasing extra funding to
local authority landlords. Only those authorities that have devolved the
running of their stock to ‘arms-length management organisations’ (ALMOs)
are eligible to receive this investment.
Area-based funding
Area-based regeneration programmes can serve as another source of funding
for housing improvements. In the past SRB schemes and Estate Action
funding have provided support. Housing is one of the six floor targets
within the government’s Neighbourhood Renewal programme, but the funding
is primarily intended to help raise the quality of service delivery – in
this case housing management – not for major physical improvements.
One-off funding schemes
There are various issue-specific funding pots which tower blocks can
benefit from. These tend to run for a limited period of time, such as a
Home Office programme offering funding for concierge schemes and CCTV.
As a consequence of these different arrangements something like a two tier
system of housing finance has evolved. Tower blocks in some areas will
benefit from significant additional investment through stock transfer and
ALMOs, but elsewhere the resources available can be very thin. This raises
an important consideration - the need to offer a practical option for some
sort of ‘refurb-lite’, for the large number of landlords without access to
major amounts of money who are looking for some simple ways to make their
tower blocks pleasanter places to live.
How social housing is used
When tower blocks were being built social housing was used by a much wider
section of the population than is the case today. Social, or ‘public’,
housing was seen as a natural option for working people not occupying
professional or managerial jobs, and the new post-war housing estates had
a greater mix of residents in terms of income levels and employment status
than they do now.
Over the last 30 - 40 years changes in society have had a major impact. A
key factor has been the growth in social mobility which has benefited the
majority of the population. Rising aspirations and affluence have led vast
numbers of ‘working class’ families to leave the social housing sector,
moving elsewhere or buying their own council houses. This has raised the
proportion of those who have little option but to stay within the social
rented sector. For many this has now been compounded by the higher cost of
housing, including social rents, relative to a generation ago; which has
created an incentive for people to remain on benefits, and stay where they
are.
Other social changes also make an impact. Compared to society at large the
low income bracket contains higher proportions of single parent families,
and black and ethnic minority people. The need to accommodate and support
ethnic diversity is a major challenge facing the social housing sector.
These changes have been felt nowhere more intensely than in tower blocks.
The reasons for this are as follows:
• Most tower blocks are located on precisely those large estates where
poor original planning and design, and systems for providing services,
have contributed to deprivation and social exclusion.
• Local authorities have statutory obligations to house those most in
need. This means that their priority is to find places for the growing
numbers of vulnerable people on their waiting lists, many of whom are
classified as homeless. This puts considerable pressure on the stock of
one or two bedroom flats – just the type of smaller units which are common
in tower blocks. Tower blocks are therefore used to accommodate large
numbers of vulnerable people with high needs.
• The ‘hothouse’ dynamic of high-rise living. People’s behaviour in
high-rise has a greater impact on their neighbours than in a conventional
street because they are living in much closer proximity, literally on top
of each other, and share communal areas such as landings and lifts. This
accentuates the impact on existing residents of housing vulnerable people
in tower blocks, usually causing them to retreat into their own flats. The
result is to increase isolation and harm communal relations in general.
For reasons such as safety, the size of units, and lack of direct access
to the outdoors means that many landlords have adopted policies
restricting the use of tower blocks for families with children. Often this
is not adhered to because of a mismatch between the homes available and
the type of households needing accommodation, but there remains a
presumption against housing families in tower blocks. This leaves two main
groups, both of whom are likely to have high needs:
• Older people who may have moved into their home thirty or forty years
ago; worked, brought up their families, and then retired; and who don’t
want to or are no longer able to move. Their needs are likely to include
good security, some degree of community and social facilities, and a level
of care.
• Younger people, often single, who may be vulnerable in some way. Their
needs may include social services support with life-skills and
rehabilitation.
The plea for tower blocks to be “handled with care” in allocations
policies runs up against some intractable obstacles. The underlying issues
are the quantity and type of stock available for use as social housing,
and many landlords will tell us that their room to manoeuver is limited.
Effectively we are saying that tower blocks are not robust enough to cater
for tenants with difficult lives and instead should be used for relatively
unchallenged people who are in work or retired. In the social housing
sector this means only middle-aged or older people should be housed in
high-rise. However, the pressure to put younger people in tower blocks
usually stems from the fact that there are more of them on the housing
register. There is a case for widening out tower block refurbishments to
include smaller schemes to increase the number of low-rise flats or small
houses. Tower blocks could then be used for ‘low-need’ groups, or for
older people who are less likely to display anti-social behaviour. The
alternatives are to transfer the blocks to private ownership or to
demolish them. In this vein Leeds City Council is currently exploring
possibilities for leasing some of their tower blocks for the provision of
student accommodation.
Changes in the landlord’s role
Over the last decade there has been a growing emphasis on the role that
social landlords can play in tackling the social exclusion faced by many
of their tenants. This has involved landlords directly in a range of
activities which go far beyond simply providing a home. Such projects
include care and support packages, training and employment schemes, and
community development initiatives. On a more strategic level they have
also become important partners in wider efforts to regenerate communities.
Government policy is an important factor driving this trend. For local
authority housing departments this requires more joined up working across
boundaries and with other agencies. For housing associations it has meant
developing the capacity to take on a whole new area of work.
The role of residents and development of tenant management
The engagement of residents is fundamental to developing strong
communities and improving services. Lessons from across the UK point to
the importance of strong residents’ organisations in tackling problems in
tower blocks. This has been an important trend, particularly over the last
10 to 15 years; and current policy – including stock transfer - is
encouraging authorities to engage more formally with residents. Police,
local authorities and other agencies need active residents to work with if
they are to have any long-term impact.
Residents organisations in tower blocks come in all shapes and sizes. At
one end of the spectrum there may simply be an arrangement devised by an
agency for consulting tenants, or an ‘old school’ tenants’ association
whose activities are confined to channeling complaints and organising
social events. Much further down the line we find energetic tenant
management organisations (TMOs) who have taken over control of services
for the block. But a full-blown TMO will not be where everyone wants to
end up, and this is a process of development, not an all or nothing
choice.
Assessment and Standards
Presently, a lot of tools are available to assess, monitor and guide
environmental and socio-economic sustainability in buildings these include
Decent Home Standard, Ecohomes and Sustainability Checklist for
Developments.
Towards decent homes
The Plan is also seeking to ensure that all social housing is brought up
to a decent standard by 2010 and the £2.8 Billion allocated for this
should make a difference. This is close to the core of this project and
creating decent homes for residents in tower blocks across the UK will
need careful planning, which hopefully this project will inform.
As stated above the Plan has also led to new efforts to improve the local
environment for all communities. This is seen as including cleaner
streets, improved parks and better public spaces: it will be important
that this includes the ‘intermediate spaces’ such as the poorly maintained
and little-used land that often surrounds social housing whether high or
low-rise.
The Decent Homes Standard
While housing condition and amenity has improved greatly over the years,
much of the social housing sector has lagged behind, largely due to lack
of investment over a prolonged period. Poor housing conditions and more
general deprivation go hand-in-hand, and often characterise social housing
estates where most UK tower blocks are found.
Local authority housing has fared worst. From the early 1980s there was a
contraction in the government grant for councils to spend on housing
improvements. At the same time councils were bound by rules preventing
them from borrowing from private sector lenders, or using receipts from
the sale of council houses. By 1996 this had led to a £10 billion backlog
of overdue renovation work.
On top of this, several billion pounds of additional investment are needed
to modernise and improve local authority housing. The government has set a
target to bring all public sector homes up to a decent standard by 2010.
The involves four tests:
1. it must meet the current statutory minimum standard for housing
2. it must be in a reasonable state of repair
3. it must have reasonably modern facilities and services
4. it must provide a reasonable degree of thermal comfort, using effective
insulation and efficient heating
This places a responsibility on councils to set a timetable for
eliminating backlog repairs in their stock, carrying out ongoing
maintenance and take the necessary actions to ensure these targets are
met. To achieve this, authorities will need to:
• assess the level and type of disrepair within their stock, compared to
the decent homes standard, and how much will it cost to bring homes up to
standard
• use an analysis of the local housing market, particularly relating to
demand and supply for council housing to decide whether and where stock
should be demolished
• assess the options available to them for raising the necessary
investment, to determine which are viable and which is the preferred
option
• work to improve their repairs, maintenance and improvement services to
ensure they are achieving the best value for money
Clearly this process requires landlords to consider the future of their
tower blocks, asking whether they should be refurbished, demolished or
left as they are.
A further question, to be assessed in the next part of this study, is how
far had the new focus on decent homes and sustainable communities
genuinely led to more of a focus on refurbishment of tower blocks. Initial
research suggests this to be the case, but more is needed.
Environmental standards
EcoHomes
EcoHomes is a flexible and independently verified environmental assessment
method for residential buildings. It considers broad environmental
concerns of climate change, resource use and impact on wildlife, and
balance of these against the need for a high quality of life, and safe and
healthy environment.
The environmental performance is expressed on a scale of ‘Pass’ to
‘Excellent’. It is an easily understood, credible label for new and
renovated homes including houses, apartments and sheltered accommodation.
EcoHomes assessments can be carried out at the design stage in a way
similar to SAP rating.
Benefits of EcoHomes include:
- Demonstrating sustainability credentials to planning authorities to
assist a smooth passage through the planning process.
- Demonstrating “green” credentials to investors helps to minimise
investment risk and increase the appeal to ethical investors.
- Demonstrating superior environmental design to customers, resulting in:
- Reduced running costs through greater energy and water efficiency, and
reduced maintenance
- Healthy, comfortable and flexible internal environments
- Access to local amenities
- Less dependence on the car
- Allowing developers to be one step ahead of regulation
Assessment process: As the housing sector makes extensive use of standard
specifications and house types, the assessment process can be carried out
in three stages:
Specification stage: Many issues can be assessed from the general building
specification; e.g. types of materials used.
House design stage: For standard house type other issues can be assessed
once only for each house type.
Development stage: The assessment of the development is carried out by BRE;
these include issues, such as ecological value of the site and transport.
ENVEST
Envest is an interactive design tool that permits the comprehensive
lifecycle environmental assessment. It permits tradeoffs to be made
between materials performance, and operational performance of the building
over the full life cycle.
All environmental impacts are measured on a single points scale called 'Ecopoints'
which allow the designer to compare different designs and specifications
directly. 100 Ecopoints are equivalent to the environmental impact caused
by one UK citizen in one year. Using minimal input data, a design team
member, can help designers instantly identify those aspects of the
building that have the greatest influence on the overall impact.
 Using Envest one can:
- Optimise building form for least environmental impact;
- Inform choice on main construction materials;
- Enable the environmental impacts of construction and operation to be
balanced - over the life of the building;
- Give comparisons for different buildings/specifications;
- Graphically illustrate the environmental credentials of a design to
clients.
- Benchmark building’s environmental perform
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introduction
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state of the art | sustainability |
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