The impact

Councillor Rachel Coxcoon, Cabinet Member for Climate Change and Forward Planning at Cotswold District Council, said: “There’s lots of advice, targets, standards and technology options out there, and smaller builders and developers often don’t have the staff and resources to deal with this complexity.  We hope the toolkit will help cut through the confusion as a ‘go-to’ reference manual for green builds. It is primarily aimed at builders and architects, but is equally useful to self-builders as well as residents extending or retrofitting their homes, and their contractors."

“If we are to reach the UK’s target to reach net zero by 2050 we need to share resources and learning so that everyone can make the right choices when it comes to low carbon homes.  From the very outset, we have designed the toolkit to be adapted and used by other local authorities, but commercial organisations are welcome to disseminate it too, to help widen the climate emergency response.”

A key objective of the Housing Advisers Programme was to disseminate results of the research.

The toolkit has been published under a Creative Commons licence which permits and encourages other councils to pick the work up, adapt it as required, and re-publish it under the same licence terms, and so maximising its reach.