Future Homes Standard: are we looking at the whole carbon picture?

By John Smith, Technical Director, Donaldson Timber Systems

The Future Homes Standard represents an important change in the way we design and deliver new homes in England.

From March 2027, new requirements will drive low-carbon heating, high levels of energy efficiency and on-site renewable electricity generation, with the intention that new homes will not require future retrofit to become zero carbon in use as the electricity grid decarbonises.

That’s a significant step forward.

But as we prepare for the new Standard, I think there is a bigger question we need to consider. Are we looking at the whole carbon picture?  Operational carbon is only part of the story.

Much of the progress made through Building Regulations has understandably focused on operational performance: how much energy a home requires for heating, hot water, lighting and other regulated uses.

The Future Homes Standard continues that journey. But every home also has a carbon impact before anyone switches on the heating or turns on a light.

Materials have to be extracted or grown. They are processed and manufactured, transported to site and assembled into buildings. There are then further impacts associated with maintenance, replacement and ultimately end of life. Together, these contribute to the embodied carbon of a building.

And this is important because embodied carbon is not currently addressed by Building Regulations in the same way as operational carbon. In its response to the Future Homes and Buildings Standards consultation, Government explicitly recognised embodied carbon as a significant contributor to whole-life carbon and confirmed its intention to consult on how it should be measured and reduced.

For those of us involved in designing and specifying homes today, that matters. Better fabric performance still matters. None of this diminishes the importance of operational performance.

Quite the opposite. Homes that are designed with high levels of insulation, airtightness and low embodied carbon will require far less energy to heat and operate over their lifetime. This is why timber frame construction is playing an increasingly important role in the delivery of low-carbon homes across the UK.

Fabric performance remains fundamental. A well-designed building envelope can reduce heat loss and help lower the energy required throughout the life of a home. But achieving that performance is about more than selecting insulation or targeting a particular U-value.

Structure, insulation, airtightness, thermal bridging, junctions and interfaces all have to work together. That’s why I believe we need to think about performance as a system rather than a collection of individual products.

And it needs to happen early. Material choice is also a carbon decision. As operational energy reduces, we also need to pay greater attention to the materials from which our homes are constructed. Every structural system has an embodied carbon impact.

Timber presents an important opportunity because it is a renewable structural material and, while trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Some of that biogenic carbon remains stored within timber products during their service life.

The only major structural building material that is naturally renewable and capable of storing carbon, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere locking that carbon into the timber for the building’s lifetime, with each cubic metre of timber storing around one tonne of CO₂.

We shouldn’t reduce the discussion to a simplistic argument that one material is always good and another always bad. Carbon assessment needs to consider the building and its materials properly across their life cycle. But equally, we shouldn’t ignore the influence that structural material selection can have.

If embodied carbon becomes a more significant measure of building performance, material choice inevitably becomes a more significant design decision. The Future Homes Standard should be a starting point. This is perhaps the bigger opportunity presented by the Future Homes Standard.

Compliance matters. But simply designing to pass the new requirements shouldn’t be the limit of our ambition.

The Government’s 2026 changes to Building Regulations are designed to produce homes with low-carbon heating and high levels of energy efficiency.  At the same time, Government has already recognised that embodied carbon is an important part of whole-life carbon that sits beyond the current regulatory framework.

That creates an opportunity for the industry to think ahead. What happens if we consider operational and embodied carbon together? What happens if structural material is considered not simply in terms of engineering, cost and programme, but carbon?

And what happens if those conversations take place at the beginning of the design process rather than after the fundamental decisions have already been made?

Better outcomes start with earlier decisions. For me, this comes back to something very simple. The best time to influence the performance and carbon impact of a home is while we still have the freedom to change it. Once the structural system has been selected, the design developed and specifications fixed, many of the decisions that determine embodied carbon have already been made.

Early collaboration between housebuilders, architects, engineers and specialist manufacturers gives us the opportunity to look at those decisions together — structure, fabric, thermal performance, buildability, manufacture and carbon rather than treating each as a separate consideration. The Future Homes Standard will rightly change how we think about the energy our homes use.

The next challenge is to think just as carefully about the carbon we use to create them. Because a genuinely low-carbon home isn’t simply one that uses less carbon in operation. We need to consider the carbon built into it too.