We risk losing our battle against climate change unless we make the built environment more sustainable. That was the message I gave the audience at a Greening our Homes seminar arranged by the Policy Exchange Think Tank yesterday. It’s a stark message, but is backed up by the facts. Around half of all the carbon emissions the UK produces each year come from buildings, with our homes contributing 27% on their own. By contrast, only 15% come from our cars, so we could reduce our carbon emissions by a greater amount with a two-thirds cut in emissions from the residential sector than by taking all our cars off the road.
Yet, when compared to sustainable transport, like electric cars, or renewable forms of energy, the built environment gets scant mention. But if we’re committed to being the greenest government ever, we need to do it in the most practical and cost-effective way we can. That means buildings. When you consider that three-quarters of the houses we have now will still be in use in 2050, it also becomes clear that we don’t just need headline policies for new build, but serious action on our existing stock as well.
In Government, Liberal Democrats are trying hard to cover all our bases. Back in October I was able to authorise the up-rating of the Building Regulations to require a 25% increase in the energy efficiency standards for New Build, and we’ve confirmed we’re going ahead with the Zero Carbon Homes standard for 2016.
Chris Huhne at DECC has taken forward plans for the Green Deal – a scheme he and I came up with in opposition in our 2007 policy paper Climate Change Starts at Home – which will target retrofitting existing homes, and is set to start in 2012. By allowing householders to pay for their green home improvements over time rather than upfront, through the savings in their energy bills, it will remove one of the biggest barriers to retrofitting – being able to afford the initial investment in the first place. It will not only be a huge step in the right direction in terms of cutting our carbon emissions, but also in creating jobs, and reducing the number of people in fuel poverty. And it will save householders money too.
Next comes the upgrade of the Building Regulations in 2013, for which work is already underway. Although not one of the more glamorous areas of government policy, the Building Regulations are a crucial tool in improving the quality of the built environment. And thanks to the Private Members Bill I steered on to the statute books in 2004 (the Sustainable and Secure Buildings Act since you asked), they can now be amended to take sustainability into account. I’m looking closely at what we can do in 2013 to improve energy efficiency standards, and find ways to supplement the Green Deal.
But setting new standards isn’t the only thing we can do – we need to make sure that existing standards are met, and it’s been apparent for many years that compliance is a big problem. That assertion is now backed up by new research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Their recent evaluation of the Elm Tree Mews Zero Carbon development in York found that although residents were comfortable and pleased with their heating bills, the homes were losing 54% more heat than designed. The report concluded that many processes and cultures within the industry and its supply chain need to change if Zero Carbon Homes is to be more than an empty slogan.
They couldn’t be more right. What’s the point of setting a standard if you don’t meet it? The last Labour Government were big on targets that they never met. We can’t afford to be. If we are to be the greenest government ever, we need to have the greenest built environment ever. Not just setting targets, but delivering results.
As part of the work my department is doing ahead of the next upgrade of Building Regulations in 2013, I have urgently put together an Advisory Committee on Compliance to look into what more we can do to make sure that standards are met, and that carbon reduction in the built environment becomes a reality.
Liberal Democrats across government take our party’s green credentials very seriously. For me, that means fixing buildings. We know that improving F and G rated homes saves more carbon per pound spent than anything else. So if we want the most bang for our buck, it has to be the top priority.
Getting new homes to perform at their design standard comes next. Slogans come last.
Watch this space.
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On new builds, one obvious thing is to promote wooden housing. This doesn’t require heat-intensive (and hence carbon producing) processes and stores tonnes of carbon (my own house has been doing so for 400 years!). Also, if we build new houses from wood, I think this should promote increased forestation (not necessarily a good thing in high latitudes due to decreased winter albedo, but fine in regions without significant snow cover). I think it is also a good insulator as well, but I haven’t checked.
Domestic properties in the US, Canada and Scandinavia are primarily wooden but here we seem obsessed with brick – which is hardly green.
Improving the standards for new builds is a great step but the bigger part of the problem is our existing buildings. Many Victorian era structures and older cannot be easily insulated without serious remedial work. A plan is needed to redevelop or replace our older housing stock if we are to be serious in our efforts to meaningfully reduce emissions.
Great stuff. Keep up the good work!
And more efficient homes of course means lower fuel bills!
Colin, what you say is true in terms of wall insulation, but there are other things that can relatively easily be done to such buildings. I raised my own property from a 4/10 to a 7/10, by concentrating on factors other than wall insulation.
There is an attitude that nothing realistic can be done about the energy efficiency of old housing stock, and that EPCs are a bureaucratic nonsense, which leads to people ignoring the measures that are realistic and achievable.
Renovating and replacing this stock is, I agree, necessary, but there are things we can be doing in the meantime.
Similarly, newer stock that we would expect to be better than the old, often leaks energy because of mistakes made in construction and maintenance. Our lofts may be insulated, but how well?
This is great work Andrew. Please make sure that the LibDem actions on Climate Change issues are co-ordinated and more importantly, reported in a co-ordianted way. One of the main difficulties of the Environmentalist position is that they usually try to play off one action agaist another – e.g. if we talk abut conservation, they say we should concentrate on renwables, when in fact a holistic approach is the only one that will work.
Jusdt as a PS. The ‘Zero Emission’ home is only code level 5 and not code level 6 as defined by the previous government – still we can’t have everything, we are in Coalition with some climate change deniers atter all!
Note that the %ages quoted here omit the CO2 that should be charged to us for the manufactured goods we import, mostly from China, amounting to c. half of all the CO2 we emit.
It’s been widely known for years that building are a major source of emissions and to its credit the last govenment got the world’s first climate change act in place. One slogan that can be dumped is being the greenest government ever. Huhne’s Green Deal opens all sorts of questions not least what’s in it for Mr Average? Lower bills I hear though better insulation. Why should he want to do this when most of the saving have been collected by B&Q. Similarly large solar subsidies are being scaled back-it’s said to leave money over for the smaller ones. These tend to exclusively for the hugely better off. Community solar has the capacity to bring its benefit to folk living in social housing and who incidently currently help the better off get their rebates from FIT’s. Electric cars is another politician’s chimera. But they take rare earth metals to produce, mostly found in China. Green action yes not greenwash-we’ve had too much that of already.
“still we can’t have everything, we are in Coalition with some climate change deniers atter all!”
Now now!
That is tendentious nonsense.
There are plenty of reasonable people who understand that climate is a dynamic system, they just don’t happen to accept the current prognosis of catastrophic anthropogenic CO2 induced global warming.
I accept all of the following:
> That climate change is always happening, and the recent historical temperature record has shown significant warming
> That climate change has frequently been both rapid and severe, which by definition makes it catastrophic to species
> That feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative, work to accelerate or mitigate the scale and rate of change
> That humans are a climate feedback mechanism, and will have an impact on the state of climate equilibrium
> That CO2 is a Greenhouse Gas, and that anthropogenic CO2 is by definition anthropogenic climate change
> That it may yet come to pass that we, as a species, are proven to be responsible for causing catastrophic climate change
However:
a) the IPCC has thus far failed to conclusively demonstrate that anthropogenic CO2 is principally responsible for what will be catastrophic climate change in the near future, or that the many claimed impacts which justify the title “catastrophe” are based on solid and sound science.
b) the IPCC climate change models that underpin this conclusion have insufficient data for long term projections, do not properly account for feedback mechanisms and thus fail to produce accurate projections, and contain too many errors to produce truthful projections.
c) the political solutions to the problem as presented by the IPCC are both staggeringly expensive for human society, and highly inefficient as a method achieving a non-catastrophic outcome, and thus require a large amount of certainty in (a) and (b) before implementing (c) becomes a sensible idea.
It is not irrational to retain some scepticism of the IPCC consensus of catastrophic and anthropogenic CO2 induced climate change. Yes, temperature has risen, and yes a proportion of this is certain to be anthropogenic in nature, but until global climate models are able to work much more comprehensively on the micro-scale (including the wider macro inputs), the ecological impact from this change remains deeply uncertain, and thus we are unable to put a value judgement on it versus the many other ailments that afflict humanity.
It is possible to note that complex systems such as climate with lots of feedback mechanisms and tangled hierarchies often fall into non-linear dynamical systems that exhibit chaotic behaviour and strange attractors in phase space, that climate has been chaotic and quasi stable long before the humans were around, and that the real argument is whether our input is disruptive enough to reposition climate into a new and wholly undesirable quasi-stable state.
It is equally possible to note that while climate dynamics are non-linear, they are not unbounded, and that while climate is wildly chaotic on both the geological and micro time-scale, this is not the case over the time frame of next few hundred years, which is what the IPCC and humanity should be primarily concerned with, and thus we can have a high confidence that there will be at least two degrees of warming before we run out of 22nd century.
In short, carbon traders should hold on to their hats if the recent announcements about a new maunder minimum occur!
good article andrew
What about lowering capital gains tax for property developers who make houses green?