The Extent and Nature of Sustainable Building in England: An Analysis of Progress

Abstract

In England, the government has pursued an agenda for a more sustainable built environment for over a decade. Yet it is difficult to know how much progress has been made. This article presents the findings of research that attempts to quantify and describe the extent of sustainable building in England. It reviews government-produced statistics and reports, data on sustainability accreditations, suppliers' information and existing research. It finds that no precise data exist on the extent of sustainable building, but there is a wealth of qualitative information on buildings and projects. The article describes the main sustainability features found in buildings and development projects in England, and presents a categorisation of eight sustainable building types. The article concludes by noting that the information base available to undertake this review is inadequate, and makes some suggestions about how it could be improved. It then reports that, as a proportion of the total building stock, the number of sustainable buildings is very small and that this is unlikely to change until building regulations and planning policies become more stringent.

Keywords:

• Sustainable buildings
• planning regulation
• England
• categories
• built environment
• data sources

Acknowledgements

This research is conducted as part of a project entitled ‘Do sustainable developments engender sustainable behaviour? An evaluation of schemes in the UK’ funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The project is part of the City Form Consortium (http://www.city-form.com/), funded under the Sustainable Urban Environments Programme. The authors would like to thank Alma Clavin and Dr Carol Dair for their assistance with this research.