The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published this week a plan to increase the use of timber in construction in England.
The roadmap is the stepping stone to encourage greater use of timber in construction to reduce the sector’s embodied carbon and help the country achieve its net-zero targets.
The roadmap is centred around the following seven priority themes:
1) Improving data on timber and whole-life carbon
Ensuring that environmental product declaration data for timber products is comprehensive and consistent. The government wants industry to encourage the inclusion of data on projects that use timber through the Built Environment Carbon Database once it launches in 2024.
2) Promoting the safe and sustainable use of timber as a construction material
The government has identified a lack of understanding and awareness of the properties of timber as a building material as a barrier to its widespread use. To address this, it will ask industry to promote timber through campaigns such as Time for Timber and the Transforming Timber web platform, which showcases collaboration and best practice.
3) Increasing skills, capacity and competency across the supply chain
Industry and government will establish a representative multi-stakeholder industry forum to drive forward initiatives and align existing activity across all timber supply chain professions to close occupational skills gaps and address the growing demand for skilled labour and competent professionals by 2025.
4) Increasing the sustainable supply of timber
This theme will assess the available supply of sustainable timber products and the development of a sustainable timber and wood-processing sector for construction in England.
5) Addressing fire safety and durability concerns to safely expand the use of engineered mass timber
Government and industry will work together with academia and the Building Safety Regulator to assess the safety and durability of timber for the expansion of engineered mass timber beyond low-rise buildings over the next five years.
6) Increasing collaboration with insurers, lenders and warranty providers
This will involve government and industry working together to facilitate a better dialogue between the insurance sector and developers to foster collaboration during and post-construction by 2028.
7) Promoting innovation and high-performing timber construction systems
The government wants to encourage innovation in building practices within the construction sector and promote methods and materials that have the potential to increase efficiency and productivity, including more offsite manufacturing and use of digital technologies that can increase quality and reduce waste.
