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There’s much of the population of the UK that looks to the Continent with scepticism, but its construction industry may have an answer to Gordon Brown’s seemingly unattainable zero-carbon-homes-by-2016 plan.

Continental house design and construction is highly innovative, and may be the solution to heat retention issues raised by a report from Leeds Metropolitan University and University College, London – called 'Lessons from Stamford Brook: Understanding the gap between designed and real performance'.

Basically the report concludes that new-build homes are below target when it comes to heat insulation, and virtually wipe out any hope for Gordon Brown’s plan for 'zero carbon' new homes by 2016.

There was a photo in one of the national newspapers in February: it was a thermal image photo of one of the impressively highly eco-friendly heat-retaining houses at Stamford Brook in Cheshire. It would normally take me a thousand words or more to describe a picture, but this one will take but a few.

If the object in the thermal image is red, then it is losing heat. The object in this case, what was designed to be a highly efficient heat-retaining house, was the colour of the FTSE after a run on a bank: blood red. I think we probably all saw it, and were shocked. You give your all, but it’s still short of the government’s targets.

The homes in question are fabulously well-made by high reputation builders, but what’s stopped everybody in their tracks was that while they are amongst the best-constructed houses in the country, they still fall short of requirements laid down to enable us to hit that 2016 target.

In a nutshell, the report states that over a period of seven years the authors tested 'eco-homes' built in Cheshire to strict insulation standards up to 15 per cent ahead of the latest building regulations and discovered huge heat losses which designers did not expect. The report says that current mainstream house building processes are unlikely to deliver, on a consistent basis, housing that meets the demands of low and zero carbon performance standards for 2016 and beyond. Right now we’re very, very good – but not good enough. We have great skills, we maybe need to import some new ideas.

The authors conclude: 'The task that is before us in the UK is to bring about fundamental change in the way houses (and other buildings for that matter) are built'.

They say a 'fundamentally different way' of building is required, based on rigorous testing for all new homes until they are really as warm and draught-free as the building standards say they should be.

Now, we can only tackle the roof bit – we’ve a fair chunk of experience, Copal Group and its roofing businesses having put the roofs on around 18,000 homes in 2007, which puts us in the top three roofing contractors working with the major developers, but we think that the wall equivalent of our roofs may well be the simple-to-source answer.

We’ve adopted the European way of designing and constructing roofs, particularly through our Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPs) focussed Roof Space business. The report is right. Perhaps it’s time to move on from the age-old insulation-between-masonry construction process and go Continental in every element of the house-building process.

We may not all like the idea, but perhaps it’s time for another smart piece of European thinking to be adopted this side of the Channel.