Toby Perkins, MP for Chesterfield and Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, delivered the keynote address today (4 December 2025) to the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Global Sustainability Conference.
Toby spoke about the environmental imperative, and business and growth opportunity, of building a sustainable built and natural environment.
He shared with the audience some of the key insights and recommendations from the Environmental Audit Committee’s recent report on ‘Environmental sustainability and housing growth’. You can read the full report online here: https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/50235/documents/271280/default/.
You can read Toby’s full speech here:
Good morning, everyone. And good afternoon to those joining across the globe.
Thank you to the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors (RICS) for hosting this important Global Sustainability Conference. And for inviting me to speak today.
It is brilliant to join today’s event and to see the interest and the support of the RICS and of the sector in the sustainability of the built environment.
I was at COP30 in Brazil last month, which was at some points, a bleak reminder of the scale of the climate crisis and the challenges of multilateral cooperation.
And at other times, I was reminded of how much can be achieved by individual cities, regions, businesses, and sectors.
I believe we could conceive of a positive tipping point in the built environment, where the benefits of sustainability are understood and mainstreamed to the point that it becomes the norm. Where people, policymakers and businesses see low-carbon, climate-resilient, nature-rich homes and communities and cities as the default, not a nice-to-have.
In my experience, there has been enormous action, innovation and initiative around improving the sustainability of the built environment. Towns and cities can be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change – for example, flooding or overheating. But they are also constantly growing and evolving, with enormous potential for change and for adaptation.
Policymakers across the globe, and certainly in the UK – which is the context I can speak directly to – are beginning to appreciate that a sustainable built environment is an environmental imperative and an electoral imperative. The public want to live in safe, secure, and green places.
But it is also an opportunity for governments – to ensure new homes and buildings are not contributing to further global warming, to future-proof communities from a changing climate and extreme weather events, to insulate economies from disruption or shocks, and to improve the health of their citizens.
Some of you in the audience today might see sustainability as a regulatory and business imperative – if so, then I think the Government is doing its job – but I hope you might also view it as an opportunity to capitalize on. To create desirable, low-cost, and climate-proof homes. To innovate and create new niches and markets for your businesses.
Previously as shadow nature minister in opposition and now as Chair of the cross-party Environmental Audit Committee, I have been following the UK Government’s policies on the natural and the built environment carefully.
Today I will speak about the Environmental Audit Committee’s recent most relevant report on ensuring housebuilding is compatible with climate and environmental goals, and offer a few wider remarks on the wider agenda of sustainable design and building.
We are in a climate and nature emergency. Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024. We are already seeing a changing climate, with warmer, wetter winters, and drier, hotter summers, and more extreme weather events, from devastating flood and scorching heat waves.
Climate change, alongside pollution and land use change, is also driving unprecedented biodiversity loss over recent decades. In just 50 years, almost 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed. Across the planet, the average size of wildlife populations has fallen by a staggering 73% since 1970.
Whilst action to preserve biodiversity is important to ensure that our human society has clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, enough food to eat, and access to resources like medicines, it is also vital to tackle climate change. Conserving and expanding carbon-rich habitats such as peatlands, woodlands, seagrass and more, is integral to sequestering carbon emissions. And mitigating climate change, of course, is vital to protecting the ecosystems that sustain us. The nature and climate crises cannot be disentangled.
In the UK, there are strong national drivers to address climate change and biodiversity loss. The UK has a legally-binding target for net zero by 2050 and it is the UK Government’s mission to achieve clean power by 2030. The Environment Act 2021 sets an ambitious but necessary target of halting the decline of biodiversity by 2030 and reversing it by 2042.
At the same time, this Government has a mission to achieve economic growth and to build 1.5 million new homes by the end of the Parliament, in order to address the UK housing crisis.
This number of new buildings will of course have significant embodied carbon and operational carbon emissions and thus implications for the UK’s climate mitigation goals.
As the RICS has pointed out, building 1.5 million new homes will release over 80 MtCO2e, which is 8% of the UK’s Sixth Carbon Budget.
And, done poorly, this scale of building could further degrade the UK’s natural capital, contrary to its environmental targets.
Recognising the political relevance and genuine policy challenge, the Environmental Audit Committee initiated an inquiry into exactly this question of how to build 1.5 million homes in a way that is compatible with the UK’s climate and nature targets.
The EAC is one of several cross-party select committees in the United Kingdom’s Parliament, tasked with holding the UK Government to account on its environmental targets and commitments.
The Committee published our report into ‘Environmental sustainability and housing growth’ just a few weeks ago.
We found that climate mitigation and nature restoration can go hand in hand with building the new homes and infrastructure Britain needs.
Far from a burden, building climate-resilient buildings and incorporating nature into new developments is necessary if we are to reduce carbon emissions and restore our natural capital alongside building new homes and expanding our infrastructure. And it makes for richer and more attractive communities too.
However, the evidence we heard was that the existing policies in the UK are not yet sufficient to ensure that building is compatible with carbon and nature targets.
Firstly, we need a better understanding of the carbon emissions of the built environment. We need to be able to measure something, before it can be reduced.
The built environment accounts for approximately 25% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, however, the impact may be greater. The National Trust calculated that failing to account for embodied carbon could result in underestimating a new building’s carbon emissions by as much as a third.
That is why the Environmental Audit Committee, in line with the RICS’s best practice and recommendations, advised that the Government introduce whole-life carbon assessments, based on the RICS methodology already in use.
Secondly, we need better incentives for people to construct and live in carbon-friendly homes, or to retrofit existing ones.
Our report suggested the Government consult on incentives to develop houses with lower full lifecycle carbon, such as a new levy on new build properties containing higher levels of lifecycle carbon. And prioritise retrofitting over demolition by reducing VAT on retrofit projects from 20% and confirming that a property brought back into use would count towards housebuilding targets.
Any changes must ensure that having a low-carbon home isn’t just for the rich to afford – retrofitting must be made available to those for whom it is most difficult, and all new development must be fit for the future.
We also investigated alternative or more sustainable building materials. During our visits to Nansledan in Cornwall and the Green Village at the TU Delft Campus in the Netherlands, we saw examples of properties built using timber-frames, hemp insulation and other materials which had the benefit of reducing the embodied carbon of the building and supporting local business.
There remains a lack of clear incentives and guidance to encourage the adoption of low-carbon material in housebuilding. The Committee believes the Government should take a more active role in shaping how low carbon materials are popularised. This could be done by providing market signals that reward sustainability. One such measure could be the introduction of eco-labelling for building products, enabling builders and developers to identify materials with lower embodied carbon.
Finally, the Committee’s report also found severe skills shortages in ecology, planning and construction, which will make it impossible for the Government to deliver on its housebuilding ambitions.
This is an area in which I take a particular interest, as co-chair of the Apprenticeships All Party Parliamentary Group in Parliament, which advocates for stronger Government policy to encourage more people into apprenticeships.
I am encouraged to hear strong Government interest in skills and apprenticeships – we need to ensure there is a pipeline of talent for sustainable industries, as well as sufficient retraining and upskilling options available, if the Government is to achieve our nature, climate, and building targets.
The Government will now have three months to review to the Committee’s report and to respond to each of its recommendations. I hope the Government will consider our recommendations closely, as I believe they are vital if the UK is to achieve its housebuilding and environmental ambitions together.
Unfortunately, we are seeing in the UK, as many of are seeing around the world, is the degradation of the political consensus for urgent action in line with our climate targets.
In the UK, the drive towards net zero is beginning to impact people’s everyday lives. There are those who are creating political dividing lines by pitting climate action against the cost of living crisis, or against economic growth.
That the current version of the UK Conservative party is abandoning some of the environmental territory that they have a proud track record on, is, therefore, hugely disappointing.
I am concerned about recent briefings from the current Government that paint bats and newts as a barrier to building new homes and infrastructure.
These characterisations are at best, lazy, and at worst, deeply damaging. They distract from some of the excellent work that many developers are already undertaking.
And they also distract from some of the more significant challenges in the planning system, such as the lack of resources and skills within local authorities to support good planning applications.
In fact, the truth is that taking environmental action is part of improving living standards for people and foundational to growing the economy – to ensuring cheaper energy bills, warmer homes, buildings and neighbourhoods more resilient to a changing climate. A stable climate and a healthy natural environment underpins a sustainable economy.
I am optimistic that we can achieve a sustainable, rich and thriving built environment.
As part of the EAC’s housing inquiry, we visited the Duchy of Cornwall’s development of Nansledan, where I saw how, through designing with nature in mind, the site was able to achieve a greater housing density, alongside a 24% net gain for nature. We saw innovative approaches to building materials. And we heard from the estate director that incorporating green infrastructure has made it a more attractive place to live and buy property.
I know there are many more examples of industry best practice and ambition.
And whilst I know more is needed and that careful and proportionate implementation is key, there are some excellent Government policies in this area, such as the Future Homes Standard and Biodiversity Net Gain.
This isn’t to say designing and building our towns and cities for the future is easy or won’t impact on people. It will require innovation, investment, regulatory certainty from Governments, and smart policy to ensure all people have access to the benefits of climate action. But this mission that we are here to discuss today is vital to tackling the climate crisis and to building more resilient, healthier, happier communities.