Turley has appointed Tom King as Associate Director in its Sustainability and ESG team, based in Cardiff and working across the UK and Ireland, with a remit covering building physics, energy modelling, Future Homes Standard compliance, CIBSE TM54 assessments and net zero strategy; this is an executive appointment, not a transaction, and no deal consideration arises.

Turley is a Birmingham-headquartered, fully employee-owned planning and development consultancy, employee-owned since 1996, operating 14 offices across the UK and Ireland including Belfast, Derry/Londonderry, Dublin and Cardiff. It is one of the largest planning consultancies in the UK and Ireland, providing planning, design, economics, sustainability, EIA and strategic communications services. 

King joins from Viro Consult where he was Senior Sustainability Consultant, having previously served as Principal Sustainability Consultant and Team Leader at XCO2, where he led a team of seven, bringing approximately nine years of sustainability consultancy experience.

The structural driver is simultaneous legislative change across multiple building performance standards, creating a compliance demand surge requiring specialist technical depth rather than generalist sustainability advice. 

The Future Homes Standard and Future Buildings Standard require dwellings and non-domestic buildings to achieve significantly higher fabric and energy performance than current Part L allows, with operational energy performance increasingly verified through

TM54 assessments mandated by planning authorities and the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard. BREEAM Very Good and Excellent ratings simultaneously require energy and overheating modelling outputs that cannot be produced without dedicated building physics expertise.

The intersection of acoustic requirements, overheating risk and energy performance, all of which King's remit explicitly covers, is the specific technical complexity that building developers find hardest to manage without specialist advice at design stage. 

Turley's Cardiff office serves Welsh planning policy, which under Future Wales and TAN 8 has distinct energy performance requirements from the English planning framework, adding a further layer of technical specificity that justifies dedicated local expertise.

For the sector, the appointment confirms that sustainability and ESG functions at planning consultancies are moving from policy advisory roles toward technical delivery capability, as the regulatory environment demands verified performance evidence rather than design-stage commitments.

Source: businessnewswales.com / turley.co.uk / gov.uk / cibse.org