You are Priya Anand, Ecosystem Director at Verdebuild Alliance, a London not-for-profit set up to help a UK market for low-carbon structural building materials come into being. This morning the tower meant to prove it lost its insurance three weeks before completion. Before you spend anything, you have to say why the market is not forming.
The situation
Verdebuild was founded in 2024, has fourteen people and £6.5 million of catalytic funding over three years from a group of foundations and a development bank. It owns no factories and sells no products: it works with the manufacturers, developers, insurers, lenders, regulators and certifiers who will one day have to trade with each other in mass timber, low-clinker cement or recycled-steel systems.
On 12 October 2026 the insurer of Speldhurst House, a mass-timber office tower, withdrew cover three weeks before completion, citing the absence of any agreed fire-and-durability standard for the building system. By lunchtime a mocking headline was circulating in the trade press. By the end of the week the funders were clear: the next £4 million tranche will depend on showing, within twelve months, that a real market is forming, not one flagship tower.
Your scorecard: 4 active participants against a target of at least 25; £12 million of private capital against at least £75 million (grants do not count); a standard legitimacy of 22 out of 100; and not a pound spent. Around you are some thirty mid-tier developers, two major insurers, three lenders, a regulator watching from the sidelines and three rival proto-standards, one of them backed by a large manufacturer with the muscle to push its own version.
Each colleague reads the morning differently. Your communications lead thinks the headline has scared off developers who were only half convinced. Your finance lead reminds you that developers always ask about cost, which is why a subsidy line sits in the draft budget. And the insurer's letter talks about the missing standard.