Organisations should produce their own in-house design standards.  These should be based on available guidance and good-practice standards.  Green Street provides information to support the development of design standards, including information from the Housing Corporation, the Government, and other established standards.  Design standards should take the minimum requirements that the organisation needs to achieve, ie Decent Homes, and go beyond them to ensure environmental improvement.  It may be appropriate to set minimum environmental criteria, and desired environmental criteria.  Once an in-house standard has been approved, this should be used on every new project to ensure that at the very least, the minimum measures have been included.  Achieving these would be far better than doing nothing and would at the very least show that you are proactive in introducing environmental measures within design stages of a project.

To account for as many scenarios and solutions as you can, the design standards should be as comprehensive as possible.  These should be reflected in the design briefs for any individual scheme.