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Abstract The UK government has established an agenda for ‘greening’ government activity and, as it accounts for approximately 40% of all UK construction procurement, is actively encouraging sustainability initiatives in this particular sector. However, there have been criticisms of its approach. The UK government anticipates investing approximately £3 billion in the social housing sector over the next three years and, as a prelude to this, has asked the Housing Corporation to promote a raft of sustainable development initiatives. This paper draws on two tranches of data in order to examine the impact of the UK government's sustainability policy on the way the public sector procures housing construction. The first of these is the sustainability improvement targets from 143 public sector housing associations. The evidence from this first tranche of data suggests that sustainability is currently seen as a low priority and that government initiatives have yet to make a significant impact. The second tranche of data uses comments from housing association development managers to examine the reasons for this apparent lack of impact. This focuses on their views and opinions of sustainability as an issue in social housing development and enables inferences to be made about their attitudes to this issue. There has been criticism about the lack of progress so far seen and the results in this paper suggest that this criticism is justified. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Hall et al. (Wed,) studied this question.