This article is an excerpt from our comprehensive Industry Insight Report 2025. Download the full report and learn from five years of data covering thousands of site inspections.
What’s in the report?
When it comes to how our homes will look for years to come and indeed the ecological health of them and the country, 2025 is a seismic year.
This is the year in which the Future Homes Standard (FHS) becomes mandatory. Once brought into force this year, any new homes and relevant buildings built from that point must comply to the new standards.
It is estimated that the heating and powering of the homes in the UK accounts for 30% of the country’s total energy use.
The aim is to ensure that new build homes are future-proofed with low-carbon heating and high levels of energy efficiency, with an expectation that homes built to this standard will produce no operational carbon dioxide (once the supply has been decarbonised), with 75% to 80% lower emissions than those built to current building regulations standards.
At our recent InSite 2024 conference, we heard from Redrow’s Group Construction Director and Technical Manager about their national rollout of air-source heat pumps to all homes on forthcoming developments.
Stone Hill Meadow was Redrow’s exemplar scheme for this rollout and Premier Guarantee were proud to provide both warranty and building control for this pioneering project.
During the ‘Future Homes Standard: The Redrow Experience’ presentation at InSite, we heard that two thirds of people surveyed said that living in an energy-efficient home was more important to them than it was a year ago, while a third preferred to move into an energy efficient property than retrofit their current home.
Other takeaways were:
We have detailed home heating trends by system, by segment and by sector over the previous five years.
In the below chart, we can see the industry proactively reacting to industry changes with heat pump adoption seeing a continuous rise while mains gas saw a sharp drop-off in 2024.
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Whilst air source heat pumps are becoming far more common, adoption rates differ by builder size. Perhaps surprisingly, according
to our data national house builders have lagged behind 'large' and 'medium' builders (below), but adoption rates have increased
dramatically across all categories of builder size.
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The increase in adoption has been led by self-builders, where as far back as 2020 nearly 30% of projects were adopting ASHP.
Other sectors are catching up with consistent growth in speculative and social housing from around 10% in 2020 to 50% of projects
in 2024. The only sector bucking this trend is currently Private Rental which saw a significant decline in 2024 (below).
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The built environment makes up around 25% of UK greenhouse gas emissions.
In December 2023, a new ambitious target to increase use of timber in the construction of homes and buildings was set out by
the Government in a move designed to reduce emissions and reach net zero.
Larger buildings can store up to 400% more carbon when built out of engineered timber products rather than concrete.
The Timber in Construction Roadmap sets out the vision to increase the use of timber in construction, whilst also presenting valuable
opportunities for economic growth, rural jobs and levelling up. Currently only 80% of the timber the UK currently uses is imported.
The below graph details from our data the adoption of timber frame by region. We can see that Scotland clearly leads the way, with Wales not too far behind.
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Every care was taken to ensure the information in this article was correct at the time of publication (January 2023). Guidance provided does not replace the reader’s professional judgement and any construction project should comply with the relevant Building Regulations or applicable technical standards. For the most up to date Premier Guarantee technical guidance please refer to your Risk Management Surveyor and the latest version of the Premier Guarantee Technical Manual.
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