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ROAD TO ZERO CARBON
A window on good specification It was recently reported that social landlord A2Dominion had completed more new homes achieving an EPC Band A rating than any other landlord in the UK. Senior Design & Technical Manager at A2Dominion Group, Derek Jay, explains how there’s no substitute for great design and the specification in generating long-term social, environmental, and financial return.
Derek Jay
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’m an architect by trade and was in practice for 23 years, working across private and affordable housing, but I decided I wanted to try to guide the strategy that dictates the design of homes by moving client side and working for a big social landlord where I could have more influence. As an architect in practice, I worked on a broad range of housing projects for private and affordable developers, but over time, I began to realise that I could have a greater influence on the sustainability of homes if I moved client side. I joined A2Dominion in 2020, with the ambition to promote sustainability, and contribute to improving our stance and policies in this area, and my colleagues and I have a strong commitment to realising the benefits of sustainability for individual households, the environment, and communities. We want to try and instil positive decision making and changes on a project-by-project basis, and ideally, our social housing decarbonisation strategies will link everything up, get everyone talking to each other, and share knowledge and good practice.
The redevelopment of Hammersmith Town Hall into homes for A2Dominion
The development challenge I’m responsible for development in London, and in the last two or three years we have been delivering roughly 800 new homes a year. However, this volume of output will be hard to maintain over the coming years, due in most part to the rapidly rising cost of development. Many construction costs have risen by 30% from when our sites were competitively
won, and this, alongside the increasing costs in managing our existing assets, means that our main priority is getting things right for our current customers’ homes, particularly in the context of property EPC ratings. A2Dominion’s priority should be building robust, and well insulated homes, using the right materials, and solving multiple problems in one go, and
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