The all-round environmental merits of timber-based building and its capacity to decarbonise construction were naturally a focus of Timber Development UK’s second Timber Design conference. But speakers also addressed its potential role in the move to a house building model centred on social value, support for local economies, well-being and creation of sustainable communities. Timber construction affordability came up too. It was explained how timber building can capitalise on social value rules allowing local authorities to set the price of land they release for development below market rate. It was described as ‘affordable land’ hiding in plain sight. Also highlighted was the potential to bill timber-based housing as a carbon offset investment alternative to forest projects.
The London conference, which was backed by timber market development body Swedish Wood, attracted an audience of over 200. They included timber traders, timber builders, architects and other specifiers, developers and housing association representatives.
The objective of the event, said TDUK chief executive David Hopkins, was to examine how timber “fits into the bigger construction picture” and how the wider timber building sector “takes advantage of current trends and latest materials, products and systems”.
“It’s also about connecting the supply chain,” he told the audience. “This is not a one-way process; we want to hear from you. At TDUK we want to join with other organisations, package up our interests with them and make our voice heard by policy and decision makers.”
The opportunities are growing, he maintained, with government now clearly backing growth in building with wood, as underlined by its Timber in Construction (TiC) Roadmap drawn up with industry. This presents strategies for boosting timber building to meet housing need, and reducing construction emissions. Critically, it’s also about underpinning growth in UK forestry and wood production.
“We’ve seen across the rest of Europe, that growth in timber consumption results in growth in forests,” said Mr Hopkins.
TDUK’s latest activities to support the sector, he added, include the relaunch of its Wood Campus modular online educational platform, again backed by Swedish Wood, designed for ‘students’ across the timber and timber building supply chain.
PROVIDING BEAUTIFUL, SUSTAINABLE PLACES TO LIVE
The opening speaker at the conference was Jonathan Smales, former Greenpeace managing director and now CEO of ‘campaigning development company’ Human Nature, which is dedicated to “delivering an exponentially sustainable future at neighbourhood level”. Its widely publicised current big project is the Phoenix in Lewes, described by TDUK as potentially the biggest timber-based housing development the UK has ever seen.
Covering a 7.9ha brownfield site, it will comprise over 700 homes. It will repurpose as much of the material from existing buildings on the site as possible, but the new housing will principally feature offsite manufactured timber-based assemblies. These will comprise engineered wood, and timber cassettes, with hemp and other bio-based material used for insulation.
A number of architects are working on the Phoenix, with their brief to prioritise people over cars, and to incorporate “shared courtyards, parks, green corridors and rooftop gardens to enable social interaction, promote communal living and provide habitats for local wildlife”.
“The question facing us is how we make the transition from the way we live and build now, which is fundamentally unsustainable, to living in an inspiring and healthy way,” said Mr Smales. “Too often the sustainability message is perceived to be about all the things we have to give up, living in a cave with the TV turned off. But we can make it about remaking places to provide beautiful, sustainable ways to live. What an agenda that is.”
Paraphrasing US statesman John W Gardner, he said that building more sustainably was actually an opportunity disguised as an insoluble problem.
“Construction, architects and designers have a huge opportunity to design a world that regenerates the climate, improves public health and helps make poverty a thing of the past,” he said.
He added that, as a “regenerative material” construction should “damn well use more timber”. The Phoenix is using as much local Sussex wood as possible. But Human Nature is not fixated on home-grown material to the exclusion of all else given that Continental suppliers may be no further from Lewes than Scottish ones.
NEW TIMBER HOUSING MODELS
Melissa Mean of community land trust WeCanMake said it too specialised in developing brownfield sites and particularly infill projects. It also places a strong emphasis on engaging with the people who will live in its housing. It sets up micro factories near sites to “localise modern methods of construction” and enables communities to “directly design, make and adapt their neighbourhood on their own terms”.
“We are currently over dependent on financialised volume house builders and our relationship with housing is still very much as a commodity. We need to make it a right, a place of belonging and agency,” said Ms Mean “We want to bring [house building] to community level, promoting local jobs and skills to develop low carbon homes on small urban sites.”
WeCanMake has also worked with timber building pioneer architects Waugh Thistleton to develop MultiMax, “an open source, home-grown timber-based kit-of-parts system for low-rise housing”. It meets UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard operational energy targets and, said Ms Mean, can be tailored to meet Passivhaus standards.
This system is also about localised prefabrication and construction. “And using home-grown timber can help us tackle the UK’s current £14bn building material trade deficit,” said Ms Mean.
She added that MultiMax housing has been tested on “real live sites” in Bristol.
Robin Dodyk of timber construction specialist Gala Homes highlighted offsite timber frame’s carbon benefits, its capacity to deskill construction at a time of mounting skills shortage, and also its quick build aspect. But the accelerated pace of construction, he underlined, puts new demands on the supply chain. “It means earlier purchase and delivery of doors, windows and so on, and the land has to be ready sooner,” he said. “All the project team need to work to the same goal, supply chain communication is key, and we need to make sure the supplier is not wagging the dog.”
The growing market momentum of MMC timber-based building was underlined by Greencore Homes, which last year secured an additional £30m from M&G Investments, following an initial £15m in 2022. This, said head of modern methods of construction Ness Scott, would help fulfil Greencore’s ambition to become a national housebuilder and deliver 10,000 homes over the next decade.
“Our current factory in Bicester can produce 200 homes a year, but future factories will have greater capacity,” he said.
The core structure of a Greencore timber frame home is its Biond panel system, incorporating hemp, lime and wood fibre. These can achieve Passivhaus levels of energy performance and lock up 30kg of CO2e/m2. Greencore’s approach is also about optimising building shape, orientation and solar gain.
“We also undertake post occupancy performance evaluation using sensors,” said Mr Scott, adding that research had shown that people who live and work in timber buildings “self-report overall better physical and mental health”.
FIRST TIME BUYERS ASPIRE TO A GREEN HOME
“A survey also reported that 80% of first-time buyers said they would prefer a ‘green home’ and 77% of buyers would opt for one for their next property,” said Mr Scott.
Given the combination of the UK’s Timber in Construction Roadmap and the government’s target for construction to build 1.5 million homes in five years, he added, timber frame building was set for a “step change”.
Speakers also addressed how timber building technology is advancing.
Matt Stephenson of Ecosystems- Technologies (ET) described its development of engineered wood products in home-grown timber. Backed with a £1.5m grant from Innovate UK, it has worked with sustainable building R&D operation BE-ST (Built Environment – Smarter Transformation), which is affiliated to Edinburgh Napier University. It is now manufacturing CLT, glulam and nail laminated kits for a range of buildings, from housing, through industrial buildings, to schools. ET turned over £4.6m in 2024 and expects that to rise to £8.5m in 2028. “Work we’ve been doing in collaboration with BE-ST, Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Edinburgh has set us up to grow the business quickly to the point where we’re ready for scaled investment,” said Mr Stephenson.
Dr Mila Duncheva of leading engineered wood building products supplier Stora Enso said one of its key objectives is to reduce the amount of timber used in construction – the result, “optimised, cost-effective buildings”. It has also focused on making the job of specifiers and end-users working on projects using its products more straightforward in terms of meeting building regulations and safety requirements.
“We liaise with insurers, there is documentation for building control, we’ve done large scale fire tests, and tested moisture performance – and we add an end grain sealer to products to protect them from factory to site,” she said. “Internationally, we have 20,000 buildings delivered – we have a system.”
HOMES ENGLAND ENDORSES TIMBER IN CONSTRUCTION ROADMAP
Edward Jezeph of government housing and regeneration agency Homes England described its role linking public and private sectors to deliver affordable housing.
It facilitated the construction of 36,000 homes last year, a 14% increase, and cleared land for a further 79,000 for development.
The agency will also be central in the implementation of the government’s recently announced 10-year, £39bn Social and Affordable Housing Programme, which aims to deliver 300,000 new homes. That will include 180,000 for social rent.
The aim, says the government, is “to tackle the entrenched housing crisis that has left families and over 165,000 children stuck in temporary accommodation, without the safe, secure, and stable homes they deserve”.
Mr Jezeph also looked at the role of the National Housing Bank, the launch of which, as a subsidiary of Homes England, was announced in June. This new Public Financing Institution or ‘PuFin’ has £16bn of financial capacity, with a goal to leverage £53bn of private sector finance to build 500,000 new homes “foster community creation and rejuvenate existing areas”.
Mr Jezeph said the Bank brings “greater agility” to the funding of new developments and will facilitate creation of house building partnering with local community leadership.
He concluded that the government’s ambitious target to build 1.5 million homes over five years should be viewed as a £330bn opportunity for the building industry. And that included the timber construction sector. Homes England, he said, endorsed the TiC roadmap and is working with the Timber in Construction Working Group.
AFFORDABLE DEVELOPMENT LAND HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Well-known timber specialist architect Craig White said the company he co-founded, Agile Homes, has developed a model for delivering offsite manufactured, ‘fabric first’ homes for people in housing need combining a wood-structure with hemp, straw, sheep’s wool and other bio-based materials. It has a 26,000ft2 prefabrication hub, which works with ‘flying factories’ near building sites.
Besides providing sustainable homes, the core aim of Agile is also to make timber-based construction more affordable and at the Timber Design Conference, Mr White highlighted two of its strategies for this in particular.
The first is to obtain low-cost development land for sustainable building. Local authorities, he explained, are obliged to consider the social value impact of housing projects, which includes environmental factors. According to the level of this, they can sell land at below market rate. Mr White described it as land that “is free and hiding in plain sight”.
The combination of Agile’s focus on homes that deliver on both sustainability and wider social value, means it presses the right local authority buttons. Consequently, it “routinely helps communities and third sector organisations secure land at transactional cost, which means the total development cost of delivering homes is lower”.
Agile is also tapping into carbon offsetting funding to reduce the end price of its homes.
It has developed calculators to establish the carbon content and social value of its housing in order to be able to generate ‘carbon and social value tokens’ (CSVT), which businesses can buy as part of their environment and social governance (ESG) systems and processes.
“So rather than offsetting their carbon footprint by investing in thousands of trees, thousands of miles away, they can buy the carbon that we can evidence is being stored for a minimum 60-year design life in our buildings,” said Mr White. “It’s an exciting opportunity and we have now done the world’s first trade in CSVT.”
