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Welsh Councils Are Not Building Green Homes
Posted: 02/05/2006
WWF Cymru say that the Welsh Assembly and local councils are not doing enough to encourage and champion the building of environmentally friendly homes. WWF Cymru lobbied Cardiff Council to make the recently approved development for 1,000 homes in Ely Bridge, Cardiff, a pioneering sustainable housing project.
The development could have been Wales's first community to produce no waste and emit no carbon, but WWF Cymru was disappointed that the final planning application, submitted on behalf of the Welsh Development Agency to Cardiff Council, did not include the infrastructure which could have enabled this to happen. It showed little in the way of conforming to the Assembly's action plan of introducing sustainable housing to Wales.
WWF Cymru is urging people looking to buy a new house to think green, and are applauding the Halifax Building Society which has recently launched an exclusive new mortgage to benefit those living in environmentally friendly homes.
The new mortgage will apply to people purchasing houses from George Wimpey, Crest Nicholson and The Berkeley Group, the three building firms which topped the Sustainability Benchmarking Survey, produced by the WWF and Insight Investment. The survey scores builders on how well they have addressed the need for new homes to be built sustainably.
However, WWF Cymru is concerned that the Welsh Assembly and local councils are not doing enough to encourage and champion the building of environmentally friendly homes. The Assembly's sustainable development action plan originally promised to introduce environmentally friendly homes by 2005, and set energy efficiency standards above the current building regulations for all new homes built in Wales, but the recent u-turn at Ely Bridge suggests that plan is still far from becoming reality.
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