Vote for 'Tomorrow's Lifestyle Home'

The brief is to design a home for families of every generation, where you could stay for life.

From 2013 every new house must comply with 16 'lifestyle home standards', such as wider doors for wheelchairs, higher wall sockets and an accessible downstairs lavatory, and from 2016 they must also be zero-carbon.

Ms Flint paid tribute to the British housebuilding industry's attempts to meet these targets.

"Our goal is to build not just more homes, but better homes.

"The UK housebuilding industry is at the forefront, not only signing up to the target but coming up with the innovation to make this happen," she said.

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'Lazy, short-sighted and irresponsible'

A leaked government memo to British MEPs about how the UK plans to reach the EU's ambitious target of increasing its use of renewables in energy consumption tenfold to 15% by 2020 from the current 1.5% has provoked anger and disbelief among green campaigners.

"Lazy, short-sighted and irresponsible," is how Caroline Lucas, Green MEP, describes it.

The memo recommits Britain to its target (part of an overall EU one of 20%) but is shot through with references to "cost-efficiency" (seven) and "flexibility" (14) - and demands more of both, with officials refusing to say what that means. It suggests that ministers plan to trade their way to the target, importing renewable energy from elsewhere in the EU - Romania perhaps - and even outside Europe.

The government is even demanding relaxation of proposed rules governing the admission of large-scale projects such as the Severn Barrage towards the meeting the targets - even if they are not fully operational until after 2020. "They now want to extend this and weaken the criteria even further after exerting pressure to include this clause in the renewables directive," said Frauke Thies, EU renewables campaigner at Greenpeace. "They're trying to water it down here and every which way. And their trading plans will meet a lot of resistance."

Lucas says it "beggars belief" that the government is failing to meet the UK's potential for renewables, "shutting its eyes, closing its ears and burying its head" towards all the arguments in favour of incentives for investment - unlike the Germans whose feed-in tariffs have produced a surge in solar and wind power.

Malcolm Wicks, energy minister, insists that the commitment hasn't wavered and Britain has taken just 20 months to produce the second gigawatt (GW) of wind power when the first one took 14 years, putting it on course to be the world's leading offshore wind park. But any energy package has to take "pragmatic" account of the costs: an extra €25.6bn for the EU by 2020 when Britain's share will be €6.7bn or a quarter compared with the comparable cost of fossil fuels.

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300,000 more elderly in fuel poverty trap

Nearly a third of a million more pensioners will be unable to afford to heat their homes properly this year.

Age Concern boss Gordon Lishman said "fuel poverty" - when more than a tenth of household income goes on energy bills - was m danger of returning to 1997 levels, before Labour came to power.

Energy bills are set to soar by an average £250 - meaning one in six of Britain's 12 million elderly will find the cost of proper heating too much, a 300,000 rise on the previous figure.

Mr Lishman said: "The Government's fuel-poverty strategy should be urgently revised.

"Gordon Brown must prove he is in touch with people's concerns by holding his own urgent summit to get the strategy back on track." For people on State pensions, annual bills of £1,200 will mean almost a fifth of their income goes on fuel.

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High petrol prices see Americans ditch SUVs

America's love affair with sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and pick-up trucks is finally over.

The gas-guzzlers that ply the country's freeways and clog its city streets and parking lots are falling victim to ever-rising petrol prices, rather than concern about the country's oversized carbon footprint. The fall-off in sales is dramatic however.

Even offers like that from a Denver showroom of a year's free petrol with each new SUV isn't shifting the pick-ups and 4x4s quickly enough to stave off financial ruin for the country's car manufacturers.

With petrol now selling for almost $4 (£2) a gallon, consumers are trading in their Humvees and Ford Explorers so fast that for the first time, one in five cars sold in the US is now a compact or subcompact. In another first, sales of six-cylinder vehicles were bypassed by smaller four-cylinder, mostly Japanese, cars in April.

In some cities sales of hybrid cars outnumber the lumbering vehicles that are still pouring off the assembly lines at Ford and General Motors in Detroit. The occasional Smart car can even be seen nipping through the traffic. "The era of the truck-based large SUVs is over," said Michael Jackson, boss of the country's largest car retailer Autonation. Another car executive called it the most dramatic shift in the market in 30 years.

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