The UK has a target of 1.5 million new homes. The debate around that number focuses almost entirely on how to reach it. The more important question is what those homes will be like to live in, what they'll cost to run, what they'll be made of, and what they'll do to the neighbourhoods they're built in.
Those questions are not secondary to the delivery challenge. They are the delivery challenge.
A sustainable housing development by RISE Design Studio - crafted from natural materials with low-carbon principles, blending community, comfort, and contemporary design.
Every period of rapid public housing delivery in the UK has produced a built legacy that reflects the values and constraints of its moment. The postwar council estates were ambitious in conception and uneven in execution. The right-to-buy era reduced the supply of genuinely affordable homes in ways that are still being felt. The current drive for numbers risks repeating the pattern: volume prioritised over quality, compliance prioritised over performance, delivery prioritised over design.
Buildings last a long time. The homes built in the next decade will still be standing in 2075, and the energy systems, material choices, and spatial decisions made now will determine how much those buildings cost to run, how comfortable they are to inhabit, and how much carbon they're responsible for across their lifetime.
Getting this right is not a luxury. It's the only rational position.
The argument for Passivhaus principles in public housing isn't primarily an environmental one, though the environmental case is strong. It's an economic one.
Fuel poverty is a persistent problem in the UK's social housing stock. Buildings with solid walls, single glazing, and inefficient heating systems are expensive to run in ways that directly affect the financial security of the people who live in them. A home designed to Passivhaus or EnerPHit standards, with super-insulated fabric, airtight construction, and MVHR, requires very little energy to maintain comfortable temperatures. The occupants of that home have lower bills, better air quality, and a more stable internal environment than occupants of standard construction.
The upfront cost of building to this standard is higher. Over any reasonable assessment period, the total cost is lower. The case for embedding Passivhaus principles into public housing programmes is straightforward once you account for the full lifetime cost rather than just the construction cost.
Public housing should be leading this transition, not waiting for private developers to demonstrate it's commercially viable.
There's a version of sustainable housing that relies on technology, heat pumps, solar panels, smart controls, to compensate for a building fabric that doesn't perform well. That's not the approach we take at RISE and it's not the approach that produces the best buildings.
Natural materials, timber, lime, hemp, stone, work with the climate rather than against it. They have lower embodied carbon than concrete and steel. They age gracefully. They create buildings with a material character and warmth that generic construction doesn't produce.
When these materials are sourced regionally, they also support local economies and shorter supply chains. A timber frame structure using UK-grown timber creates a different kind of economic relationship between the building and its context than one using imported steel and concrete from global supply chains. Public housing programmes operate at a scale where material choices compound into significant supply chain effects. Getting those choices right creates conditions for the kind of circular, regionally embedded construction economy that currently barely exists in the UK.
This isn't idealistic. It's a question of policy will and procurement strategy.
One of the less-discussed barriers to better public housing is the shortage of construction workers with the skills to build it well. Airtight construction, careful detailing around thermal bridges, the correct installation of natural insulation materials: these require training and experience that the current workforce doesn't have in sufficient depth.
A serious public housing programme, designed around the performance standards the climate requires, would need to invest in skills alongside buildings. Retraining programmes for existing trades, new apprenticeship routes in sustainable construction, fabrication facilities for engineered timber components: these are the supporting infrastructure of a genuinely regenerative building programme.
They're also investments that create long-term employment in construction, in material supply chains, and in the specialist trades that high-performance buildings require. The economic case for this investment is real, and it sits alongside the environmental case rather than competing with it.
The construction industry doesn't lack knowledge of how to build better buildings. The barriers are systemic: procurement frameworks that favour lowest upfront cost, planning systems that don't consistently reward design quality, building regulations that set minimum standards rather than genuine performance targets, and a political cycle that measures success in units delivered rather than quality of life improved.
What would genuinely help is policy stability: clear, long-term guidance on energy standards that allows the industry to invest in the skills, supply chains, and processes that higher performance requires. A consistent policy environment for the next decade, even if imperfect, would do more for the quality of what gets built than another round of consultation followed by diluted regulations.
The case for a more coordinated approach to construction innovation, whether through a dedicated ministerial responsibility or through a properly resourced industry body, is that the transition to regenerative building practice requires coordination that the market alone won't provide. The knowledge exists. The technology exists. The missing ingredient is the institutional framework to deploy them at scale.
At RISE, we work on residential projects at the scale of individual houses and small developments rather than large public programmes. But the principles we apply, fabric-first design, natural materials, low embodied carbon, genuine energy performance, are the same ones that should be shaping public housing at every scale.
The best argument for these principles is the buildings themselves. Herbert Paradise, Douglas House, the Ice Cream House: these are homes that perform well because they were designed carefully, specified honestly, and built with sustained professional oversight. They're also homes that people genuinely want to live in, which is the point.
Public housing that applies these principles consistently, that treats performance and design quality as inseparable, that invests in the skills and materials required to build well rather than just to build quickly: that's what regenerative city-building actually looks like.
The 1.5 million target is an opportunity as much as a pressure. What those homes are will matter long after the delivery deadline has passed.
If you're working on a housing project and want to understand how a genuinely sustainable approach could work for your scheme, we'd be glad to have that conversation.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
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