If the UK wants to achieve Net Zero by 2050, there will need to be a substantial reduction in carbon emissions from the residential sector.

This will be challenging, to say the least. Britain has some of the oldest, most inefficient housing stock in the developed world. And building the millions of new homes needed to tackle the housing crisis will only add to the sector’s carbon footprint.

The good news is that domestic emissions have actually been falling consistently over the last two decades, thanks to improved insulation, grid decarbonisation and warmer weather. Technologies like air source heat pumps and rooftop solar may not have had the hoped-for impact yet, but they can still play an important role in reducing emissions – as can new AI-powered developments in renewables and grid efficiency. Using these technologies to retrofit the UK’s leaky old homes would make a huge difference.

Equally, new homes are much more efficient operationally – and thanks to AI tools that also make building design and construction more efficient, coupled with advances in materials technology, we should see the embodied carbon associated with new-builds fall over time.

Critically, this is not just an environmental issue. Making our homes more energy-efficient also makes them cheaper to run, future-proofed against new regulation and better protected against climate change-related risks. That makes them more attractive to future buyers. So lower-carbon housing is not just an ecological (or even social) imperative: it’s an opportunity to create long-term economic value.