The UK Government’s commitment to deliver 1.5 million homes in 5 years is a challenging one. At the UK Timber Design Conference in July 2025, leading designers, developers, campaigners and manufacturers showed that timber construction is a powerful and sustainable means to approach that ambitious housing target…
“It’s not about just ‘doing the same thing but better’ – it’s about doing better things,” urged Jonathan Smales as he kicked off 2025’s UK Timber Design Conference. Jonathan is Founder and CEO of Human Nature, a campaigning development company that is spearheading the Phoenix development in Lewes, an ambitious timber-based new settlement.
Jonathan Smales, CEO of Human Nature, delivering the keynote address at the UK Timber Design Conference 2025
His opening speech was all about flipping the sustainability message on its head. All too often, sustainability is portrayed as an imposition – a necessary chore – but Jonathan showed the packed room how sustainable design can create healthier places and happier people.
Sustainable construction need not merely be a low-carbon version of business as usual; it can make transformative places that improve people’s lives.
A timber solution for affordable, sustainable growth
How Shall We Live? is Human Nature’s collaborative new manifesto. At its core is a placemaking model based on clusters of villages: people-centric places that are walkable, coherent and well-connected to a hub town and to local/national transport.
It’s a manifesto backed up by ideas, research and designs by a number of leading architects and engineers; you can read more about it in our in-depth summary. Jonathan introduced positive themes that would recur throughout the conference.
The government’s ambitions – and how timber fits in
Edward Jezeph (Senior Manager, Homes England) provided the perfect follow-up, opening a window onto the wider political context. He brought us up to speed on the recently announced National Housing Bank – backed by over £16 billion of public investment – and on the Strategic Place Partnerships introduced in 2022, which work with Combined and Local Authorities to unlock housing and regeneration.
Edward Jezeph, Homes England, provided some essential political background
We were told to look forward to updates on the Government’s 10-year housing strategy – likely to include support for Modern Methods of Construction (MMC), with more of a technical focus that could address MMC’s market challenges.
Housing as a right, timber as a lever
“Every neighbourhood can be a bit more timber,” stated Melissa Mean (Founding Director, WeCanMake), who followed him. Her calls for “housing as a right, rather than an investment”, and for “less talk about units, more talk about people and opportunities”, were bolstered by real-world examples of community-led housing in the southwest.
WeCanMake recently launched the MultiMax system (read our article about it), an ingenious OSB-based ‘kit of parts’ delivery mechanism. Melissa brought home the huge potential of infill in the UK to provide sustainable urban densification. There’s an abundance of underused existing sites in areas that already have public infrastructure in place.
Melissa Mean, Founder of WeCanMake, brandishes some OSB (oriented strand board), an integral material to the Multimax system
She concluded with a manifesto of sorts: a set of demands to kickstart the kind of sustainable housing the UK needs. They included, among others:
- regulation of embodied carbon;
- setting a national target for biomaterials in construction;
- prioritizing well-located homes;
- joining up housing delivery with retrofit;
- bringing community-led housing into the mainstream;
- and fast-tracking ‘low-carbon common-good homes’
The regulation of embodied carbon – a call for a Part Z in UK building regulations – was number one on her list, and this would go on to become a common refrain of the conference.
Same ducks, different order
England has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to timber housing. That became abundantly clear when listening to Robin Dodyk (Head of MMC, Cala Homes) and David Crawford (Managing Director, Deeside Timber Frame). In Scotland, timber housing is the mainstream, with timber frame accounting for over 80% of Scottish new-build homes.
Robin brought home the many programme and cost advantages of timber frame. He emphasized the delivery certainty of offsite panel-based construction – how cold and wet weather (not uncommon in Scotland) is not an obstacle to delivery programmes, and how around one-third of Cala’s builds are completed in just 7-10 days. The factory-based model of timber-frame production also provides an answer to construction’s skills shortages and ageing workforce, he pointed out. For anyone as yet unfamiliar with timber-frame construction he had a reassuring turn of phrase: “It’s the same ducks in a row; they’re just in a different order.”
“Would you build a car in a field?”
David Crawford asked this question – underlining the principles and advantages of MMC (modern methods of construction) and timber. He gave us all a refresher on MMC, making it clear how well timber frame sits in Category 2. Standardisation, with all its efficiencies, need not mean cookie-cutter buildings: David showed us that a whole range of different flat types and house types were easily achievable within a DFMA (design for manufacture and assembly) approach. All of which made clear why Deeside are confidently expanding their operations.
A rhetorical question asked at the conference by David Crawford, Deeside Timber Frame
High quality buildings, built sustainably
“We want to create the most impactful places for people and planet,” asserted Jonathan Wilson (Managing Director, CITU). That sums up the mission of CITU, a successful Yorkshire-based developer providing high-performing timber houses and other buildings.
CITU set up its MMC factory almost a decade ago and it is dedicated solely to CITU’s own projects: manufacturing timber panels that use wood-fibre insulation to keep embodied carbon low. Jonathan ably demonstrated the virtues in staying relatively small in terms of business size while punching well above weight in delivery numbers and quality. It was instructive to see and hear how CITU were unlocking brownfield land with panel-based MMC solutions in Yorkshire.
The Oxfordshire-based Greencore Homes are also timber-frame manufacturers who favour wood-fibre insulation. Ness Scott (Head of Planning and Sustainability) told us that Greencore’s Bicester facility delivers panels for 200 homes per year, with a typical build time onsite of around two weeks. They target the LETI 2030 standards and build to Passivhaus thermal performance standards of less than 15 kilowatt hours per square metre. “If we don’t build properly, we’re just adding to the retrofit problem,” Ness pointed out.
Read further insights and highlights from the UK Timber Design Conference 2025:
The state of UK construction in 2025: Barbour ABI shares analysis & outlook
UK must embrace timber construction to meet climate and housing goals
