"the Construction Confederation and Construction Products Association says that construction output is expected to shrink both this year and next, as the problems of the economic slowdown are exacerbated by rising prices of energy and raw materials."
http://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3120274
I wonder what this means for the Code for Sustainable Homes.
All new homes are supposed to meet Level 3 by 2010, 4 by 2013 and then 5/6 by 2016. While Lv6 hasn't yet been defined, research shows that currently it will cost about £47,000 per house extra to meet this target.
We also have targets to build about 300,000 houses per year between now and 2020. That's an extra £14,100,000,000 per year the construction industry will have to fork out!? Not to mention our affordable housing targets!
We really need to get our supply chains sorted now if any of this is to be achieved.
Interesting set of conflicting issues. If output is shrinking then you would expect that is due to shrinking demand - so where are all these people going to end up living? Worrying..
Also, I thought the target was to build 3 million new homes - you would expect that demand was at an all time high due to immigration and population increase (is indiginous population still increasing in the UK)?
By how much would the £47k come down due to scale and technology effects? I'm hoping that the government have their sums together on this...