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.
I’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 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 it is my belief that sustainability in housing means more than just the environment, it should also encompass the sustainability of people and communities. All three are interlinked.
There are a number of key criteria that A2Dominion must consider when evaluating building products and materials, these include resident use, ease of maintenance, and environmental efficiency.
We know that we need to take good decisions around carbon reduction and form strong group-wide relationships with forward thinking companies.
Supplier relationship
A good example of how we’ve worked closely with a supplier to ensure building products deliver long-term positive outcomes for A2Dominion and residents is NorDan UK.
NorDan’s windows are helping us reduce the whole life carbon in homes by using timber, and materials with an extended lifespan that are easy to recycle at the end of their ultra-long life. NorDan’s composite timber windows deliver good environmental performance, and from a maintenance and use point of view, our residents like the familiarity of timber inside their homes.
Having a durable thin aluminium layer on the outside also makes a lot of sense because it extends lifespan and reduces the need for maintenance because we need building solutions that tick multiple boxes. Moving forward, we need to continue to strive to make our homes as energy-efficient as possible, so they are affordable to heat and run, and to fulfil our commitment to sustainability targets. To achieve this, A2Dominion will continue to consider new approaches to building and improving homes, embracing new products, materials and methods.
View from the window: Tom O’Sullivan, NorDan UK
Tom O’Sullivan is the Technical Specification Advisor for NorDan UK in London and the Southeast of England, he explains: “Derek and A2Dominion were very clear from the outset, that, where possible, building products needed to meet their social, environmental, and financial return criteria.
“Technically, for us, this translated into ultra-low U-value windows, delivering Passivhaus levels of insulation and airtightness. This then contributes to optimising the performance of the home — reducing operational carbon and making a house warmer, and more energy and cost efficient for residents.
“The outward-opening reversible windows specified by A2Dominion are manufactured from sustainably grown timber, making them carbon neutral at the point of manufacture, and incorporate an ultra-thin layer of aluminium on the surface of the wood, which should deliver up to 60 maintenance free years. This all results in very low levels of embodied and whole life carbon, all of which can be reviewed in granular detail via the product’s Environmental Product Declaration — or EPD.
“The windows also have an inbuilt restrictor, for safety and security, and can be cleaned on the outside from the inside — extra added design features made with the user in mind.
“I’m pleased to say NorDan now has a supplier agreement with A2Dominion, and is working on future projects, but it isn’t alone in demanding more from its building products and suppliers.
“We are now supplying 10 of the 12 G15 London landlords, which 100% supports the rhetoric that social landlords are thinking three dimensionally about future and return, including the environmental and social challenges they face.”
