A PANEL of leading experts including two Labour MPs is set to debate sustainable solutions to tackle Britain’s housing crisis.
The panel will convene on Tuesday 24 September at Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.
The event will explore the role of timber in speeding up housebuilding, reducing construction’s impact on the planet, and delivering high quality low energy homes.
Naushabah Khan MP, Member of Parliament for Gillingham and Rainham and Mike Reader MP, Member of Parliament for Northampton South head up the panel.
They sit alongside Andrew Carpenter, Chief Executive Officer, Structural Timber Association and Branwen Evans, Group Director, Sustainability and Policy, Places for People.
The Labour Government has set itself the target of building some 1.5 million homes over the course of the Parliament.
This equates to an average of 300,000 new homes each year – a figure never achieved by any Government in British history.
To meet the target some 1000 new homes will have to be built in the UK every single day.
The public is rightly demanding that Labour gets Britain building. But at the same time, the Government has the gargantuan task of decarbonising the economy and accelerating the UK’s path to Net Zero.
The built environment is responsible for approximately 25 percent of total UK greenhouse gas emissions.
If Sir Keir Starmer is to succeed where many a Premiership has failed on housing, the Government must embrace change – change in how we build and the materials we use.
Timber frame is the lowest carbon material available. it can deliver a 16 percent carbon saving during construction and it takes less time to build a sustainable timber frame house, than using other materials.
There is existing capacity in the established structural timber manufacturing sector to rapidly double timber frame manufacturing output to achieve 100,000 homes per annum – equivalent to 1-in-3 of the 300,000 homes needed each year.
Britain’s housebuilders are getting on board, with companies including Vistry, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Developments, Cala Homes and Avant Homes seeing the benefits of building in timber frame. It’s high time Whitehall showed similar enthusiasm in putting timber at the heart of its strategy for housebuilding.
Andrew Carpenter, CEO of the Structural Timber Association, said: “Structural timber is the sustainable answer to 1.5m homes – it offers speed of construction, reduces construction’s impact on the planet and delivers high quality low energy homes, built to last.
“The new Labour government has an incredible opportunity to rethink how we build this level of homes, sustainably to create great places to be proud of. I look forward to putting this case forward at Labour’s first autumn conference as the new party of government.”
Tickets for the event are available here: Labour Conference – Structural Timber: The sustainable answer to 1.5m homes Tickets, Tue 24 Sep 2024 at 15:00 | Eventbrite.
