There is unprecedented interest in green building at the moment, with every conceivable sector of the industry now clambering over each other to have their sustainability announcements heard. The latest is the Home Builders Federation (HBF), its message is clear enough - let’s build to better standards than the Scandinavians (see page 29). Apparently its head honcho, Stewart Baseley, has been touring Scandinavia and the Netherlands with Yvette Cooper MP, looking at examples of low carbon housing. What a turn up for the books! The HBF has been, until now, the most foot dragging (it may prefer the term conservative) of organisations regarding the concept of energy efficient and ecological homes since I first took an interest in the subject way back in 1989. At that time I was a housebuilder myself and personally visited its offices in London to try to persuade the HBF of the need to encourage its membership to change building practices, but my pleas fell on deaf ears.

So, why all the sudden interest? Well, I probably don’t need to remind BFF readers why - climate change and dire warnings of flooding, water shortages, heatwaves and typhoons. Top politicians are battling it out for who can be greenest and I soon expect to hear of a TV show called ‘Get me out of here, I’m the greenest’!

The media, and rightly so, are revisiting the environmental agenda as fervently as they did in the late eighties, but this time rather more seriously than they did throughout the nineties. Then, the best that the broadcasting media could come up with were dustbin challenges, where two families would weigh themselves on Monday, then run up and down between the supermarket and the bottle bank for the rest of the week, to see who could buy the most grub and recycle the resultant packaging (mostly empty bottles of Blue Nun or Chianti)! Not that the naff eco-TV shows have all gone away - they have simply grown up a bit and got trendier, pandering more to the new eco-consumerist.

Regardless of this, the Stern report, the Queen’s speech and other issues, all combine to concentrate our thoughts a little more, and hopefully we may well see a move from lip service to real practical action. However, let’s not get out the bunting and start celebrating too soon. I suspect a corporate takeover is underway. Those of you that enjoy organic and fairtrade produce may have already noticed how the small eco-entrepreneur businesses are starting to be swallowed up by the multinationals. This sort of takeover strategy is likely to become commonplace in the construction industry as large - national and international - product dealers swoop in to buy up the viable new technology and ecological startups.

A bad thing? Well, I’m not really sure. I’m a little concerned that all this smacks of the old model - the model that seems to be responsible for the perils that we now face. Perhaps, as well as rethinking the way we consume resources, and the quantity that we consume, should we be re-assessing our business models - shareholders, corporations, privatisation etc. - and their relationship to society. Should we use this occasion as an opportunity to stand back and assess not only our future, but our past. We can guess how difficult a politician’s job is, but our present political system seems to allow too much business intervention. Currently, the loudest and most heard lobbyists are those with vested interests. Up until now most housebuilders have been lobbying hard against the environmental agenda. Has the leopard finally changed its spots? As usual, we will probably have to wait and see

Regards Keith Hall