SELFBUILDER SURVEY: BUILDING A LOW CARBON HOME KEY SURVEY FINDINGS
Projects & roles Overall, the number of people building, retrofitting or aspiring to build a low carbon new home has gone up since our 2022 Selfbuilder Survey, from 31% to 37%. Of this number, 19% said they were aspiring to do their low carbon build, but hadn’t started work yet. The percentage of people saying they saw themselves as
‘self-builders’ stayed relatively similar, with this year’s figure being slightly down at 54% versus 56% (people selecting ‘self-builders’ plus ‘hands-on builders’) in 2022. The number of people describing themselves as ‘custom-builders’ has however halved since 2022, from 12% to 6%. A higher proportion (62%) are employing an architect compared to last year (58%), with just 38% designing a home themselves, against the previous 42%. Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they were project managers on their build, more than double the number last year (13%), and 15% were architects, compared to 13% last year.
The Government’s own figures, covering October 2021 - October
2022, show a drop of 34% from the same period a year earlier in registrations of interest in serviced self-build and custom-build plots, totalling just 8,034 new individuals. Planning permissions granted for serviced plots suitable for self and custom-build were down too, by 23%, to a total of 6,374, pointing to either lack of interest – or lack of plots. It’s over to the Government for an answer to that one.
Despite huge publicity about the importance of retrofitting to keep energy use and therefore costs low, only 5% said they were working on a low carbon retrofit; less than half the number last year, when this figure stood at 12%. And only 13% were aspiring to do such a low carbon retrofit project in future, against 14% in 2022. This is unlikely to see a marked change until VAT is completely abolished for renovation projects; it only had a qualified reduction in 2023 despite the promises. The biggest survey response from our readers came from the
South East of England, where a quarter (25%) of respondents were based, followed by the South West (22%) and Scotland (12%), suggesting that these are the areas of the UK where self-build is most popular.
Eco goals
The most surprising facet of the responses to the ‘eco goals’ questions we asked was the big increase in the number of people aiming to achieve Passivhaus-level performance; the very highest standard in energy efficient buildings. The proportion has gone up from 24% saying this was their goal in 2022 to 35% this year, with a healthy 16% of respondents saying they would be going full-throttle and seeking Passivhaus certification, compared to only 2% last year.
This suggests that in the face of wider public awareness of
energy-efficiency, ambitious self-builders want to stand out from the crowd by hitting the gold standard. Passivhaus is the answer, it would seem. While 40% of last year’s
respondents said ‘very low emissions’ was a major self-build aim, only 23% stated this as an ambition this year. Those hoping to achieve ‘fairly low emissions’ stayed around the same, 23% this year compared to 24% last year.
Reasons for building a low carbon home Last year, achieving lower energy bills was top of the list of key reasons for building to high energy efficiency levels, with 69% of survey respondents admitting this was their main motivation. However, despite colossal rises in the prices of gas and electricity
over the last 12 months, ‘lower bills’ is cited by only 61% of people – in 2022 it was the favourite choice of 69% of respondents. Saving money in the short term has been superseded by the winning triumvirate of ‘reduce overall carbon footprint’, ‘avoid contributing to climate change’ and ‘security against energy price rises’, all coming in at 64%. Last year, minimising individual contribution to climate was cited by 63%, but just 57% of the survey sample were concerned about reducing their overall carbon footprint, and 60% wanted security against energy price rises. This new interest in saving the planet suggests that public opinion is now being swayed by compelling and widely disseminated arguments about the need to reduce carbon emissions from the built environment. Not to mention fears over reliance on imported fossil fuels in future. However, interest in installing renewables to earn income
from the grid – for those lucky enough to be able to generate more electricity than they use – has actually dropped, from 11% of respondents, to just 9%, perhaps underlining the impact of confusion over Government policies in this area.
Levels of understanding We were really keen to find out if levels of understanding about building or retrofitting low carbon homes had increased in the intervening 12 months since our previous survey. In 2022, 45% of respondents were confident they had a ‘strong’ level of understanding, with 17% saying that their knowledge was ‘very strong.’ Only 37% this year fell into the ‘strong’ category, but 24% pointed out that they considered themselves to have a ‘very strong’ level of understanding. This suggests a trend that self- builders are increasingly keen to educate themselves and learn about low carbon techniques and materials. Correspondingly, only 3% of respondents admitted to either ‘weak’ or ‘very weak’ understanding, compared to 8% for both last year.
nov/dec 2023
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