New homes in new towns can exemplify sustainability and resilience

New towns will bring a welcome boost to housing supply as well as valuable placemaking opportunities across the UK. The government has doubled provisions of social rent housing to 20% under the programme, as part of a wider 40% affordable housing requirement.

Setting this target is an important milestone but there is a bigger opportunity: ensuring new social homes in new towns are built to high standards of sustainability and resilience.

The newly announced Future Homes Standard makes significant strides in energy performance and in cutting carbon emissions with its requirements for low carbon heating, and for solar PV, on new homes. Beyond the new building regulations standard, the UK should strive for a holistic approach to improving the resilience and sustainability of homes, exemplified through those built in the new towns.
How the new towns programme is delivered will have consequences far beyond just the 7 chosen sites which the government wants to position as a blueprint for the future of UK housebuilding.

The areas that need to be addressed, and standards that can be met, to achieve this are increasingly clear. Homes England’s new Healthy Homes Standard (HHS), which is being embedded in the Social and Affordable Housing Programme, considers issues including indoor air quality, daylight, thermal comfort, noise and access to green spaces to deliver the strongest possible social value to residents and communities. The standard even covers the issue of embodied carbon, ensuring that the impacts construction materials have on climate change are minimised.

BRE’s sustainability assessment tool BREEAM for residential new construction sets standards that closely map the areas covered by the HHS. As well as taking a holistic approach, BREEAM, with its third-party verification, ensures that standards are actually delivered in practice. For example, the City of London Corporation has set new social housing benchmarks across its Sydenham Hill Estate and York Way Estate projects, following the integration of BREEAM methodologies within its Housing Design Guide.

Embedding robust standards for sustainability and resilience in the new towns’ social housing, ensures communities will be future-proofed against a changing climate and residents will benefit from healthy and quality homes which deliver social value over the long-term.

MHCLG data shows that just 0.7% of social homes get demolished each year. Nearly all the homes we build now will be around in the net zero target year of 2050, and most of them for many decades and probably centuries beyond that. New towns will be permanent features within this landscape. With the government having chosen seven new town sites this spring, the UK has an opportunity to set a new benchmark in the way social homes are delivered. Seizing this opportunity is an investment that will deliver long-term value.

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of the Housing Association Magazine.