About us

Introduction

Don’t Waste Buildings is the voluntary effort to put a spotlight on up-front, or embodied, carbon and make the case for the productive use of empty and underperforming buildings.

These buildings, all over the UK, and globally, are untapped economic and social assets, not structures to be casually discarded. They could be utilised to deliver much-needed housing and development at greater speed, lower cost and with less of an impact on our environment.

Our group was founded in December 2022 and is non-party political, run by a collection of individuals made up of leading property developers, financiers, architects, engineers, heritage experts, and others.

The ‘Hymn Sheet’ outlines our campaign and key ‘asks’ of policymakers and regulators.

We are a voluntary group, with no funding, membership fees or commercial interests of any kind. This allows us to maintain independence and to focus on achieving our key objectives:

Policy clarity and financial incentives to make the reuse of existing buildings simpler and more profitable in order to stimulate growth in the housing and development sector.

Membership

We have over 2,400 members (as of April 2026) who join via our LinkedIn group. Membership is free and voluntary.

Chapters

Regional Chapters can be found across the UK in London, East, South West, West Midlands, North West and Scotland.

We also launched our first international chapter in April 2025 in Australia, based in Melbourne.

Scroll down to see our Chapter Leads and connect with them via LinkedIn (or send a message via our contact form) if you’d like to volunteer to help with local chapter activities.

Workstreams

In order to help us organise our efforts, we have established several workstream teams:

• Engagement: Perhaps the most critical aspect of DWB is working with central and local government officials and politicians, as well as leaders across the built environment, to build support for the policy and financial changes to enable reuse and ‘retrofit first’. You can read about some of our engagement activities through our various roundtable and workshop reports, located in the ‘Guidance & Research’ section of our Resources page, as well as some of the stories in our News section.

• Emerging Policies: Advocating for ‘Retrofit First’ policy implementation at central government and local planning authority levels is a key outcome that we are pursuing. The emerging policies team tracks the progression of such legislation and associated regulations, and aims to work with government and industry to understand the issues, share best practices/lessons learned through resources like our Planning Policies Supporting Retrofit guidance document (2024), and explore sensible solutions.

• Financial & Tax Incentives: Our feeling is that if the finances of retrofit and reuse do not stack up, they just will not happen, so our Financial & Tax Incentives team studies and recommends potential solutions to central government and local authorities. Perhaps the best example of their work is our paper, The Reuse Dividend, launched at the House of Commons on 14 April 2026.

• Case Studies: Seeing is believing. The Case Studies team selects, organises and hosts our popular case study tours and webinars, as well as gathering detailed data on each project to feed our database for future insights and analysis.

• ChatDWB: Our incredibly powerful AI platform, powered by OmniChat.uk, which helps us with research projects, copywriting, data analysis and productivity.

• Profile Building – Speaking at industry conferences and events, lecturing at universities, being interviewed for podcasts and articles, hosting membership meetings and webinars, engaging with online and traditional media, maintaining our website, publishing our email newsletter – this team handles a wide range of highly important activities to enable us to be seen and to ‘spread the word’ about DWB. We even had a song written!

Scroll down to see our Workstream Leads and connect with them via LinkedIn (or send a message via our contact form) if you’d like to volunteer with a particular workstream.