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Bellway builds around 8,500 homes a year — and a large share of its carbon footprint comes not from construction, but from the homes people live in after they buy them. Jamie Bursnell, Group Head of Technical and Innovation at Bellway Homes, has spent years working out how you actually decarbonise a new home at scale.
His conclusions upend a few assumptions. The gas boiler won't be banned — the compliance tool will simply make it impossible to build with. And the hardest problem isn't technology, it's pricing: with electricity roughly three times the cost of gas, the greener home can cost more to run, and no politician wants to move that cost.
In this episode:
→ Why the end product, not the process, is where real estate must innovate
→ How the Future Homes Standard ends the gas boiler without banning it
→ The Energy House: testing a full home in a climate chamber
→ What the heat pump research revealed: more is less
→ Why electricity at 3x the price of gas is the real barrier
→ How batteries and smart charging change the maths
→ Embodied carbon, timber frame, and why bricklayers matter
Timestamps:
[00:01:00] Why house builders are the closest thing real estate has to a product
[00:02:00] Bellway's scale, and its two drivers for innovation
[00:03:00] The Future Homes Standard and the end of the gas boiler
[00:11:00] Why not build somewhere to test and iterate the product
[00:12:00] The Energy House opportunity — a home you can experiment on
[00:16:00] The heat pump lesson: fewer pumps, simpler controls, more is less
[00:21:00] Electricity at three times the cost of gas — the core problem
[00:26:00] Smart charging, batteries and running cycles on free solar
[00:34:00] Embodied carbon: 35 tonnes in a typical home, and timber frame
[00:43:00] Why bricklayers didn't enjoy the low-carbon bricks
[00:45:00] The magic-wand fix: invert the cost of gas and electricity
The Future We Build is a podcast exploring sustainability, innovation and systemic change in the built environment, hosted by Alex Edds. New episodes weekly, filmed at Mute showroom, Great Sutton Street, London.
🔗 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-future-we-build
Connect with Alex
✉️ alex@thefuturewebuildpodcast.com
🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexedds
