First word

The UK has become the first country in the world to publish a plan, and legally binding targets, to achieve the emissions reductions required to avoid runaway climate change. Emerging data shows that the targets do not yet go far enough, but there is no denying the ambition and scope of the carbon budgets proposed by the Committee on Climate Change.

The trouble is that we are better at the talk than the walk. Germany, in contrast, has not made many promises but has quietly got on with implementing innovations in fiscal policy (such as feed-in tariffs), in architecture and town planning (such as Vauban, Solar City), in standards (such as Passivhaus) and in a host carbon lowering and renewable technologies. Germany has also announced a plan of making all homes - yes, all - optimally energy efficient by 2020.

The absence of a plan for retrofitting the UK’s existing housing stock at anything like the right scale is probably the single biggest national policy failing, in terms of matching the ambitions of the emissions reduction targets with action on the ground. The use of homes is estimated to be responsible for around 27 to 29 per cent of all UK emissions. I am confident that by 2050, through a combination of modest lifestyle changes, energy efficiency and decarbonising the energy supply, we can reduce this to near zero.

The first step is to start implementing excellent energy efficiency measures in our housing stock, adopting the policy that the disruption and cost of a proper upgrade of the fabric must only be happen once. This retrofit can be done with existing technologies, but to understand working at the scale required and to test alternatives, we first need a programme of pilot projects covering every type of property in different geographical locations. In advance of the last budget, David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, and I wrote jointly to the chancellor urging an investment of £3 billion in such a pilot. We argued that quite apart from helping achieve emission targets, and vastly improve our knowledge base, such a programme would create and safeguard jobs, alleviate fuel poverty, and create healthier dwellings. As around a quarter of our housing stock is in some form of social ownership, public funding is the only way of retrofitting it, and will have to be done sooner or later. Financially, what we have is a cash flow problem.

This investment will have guaranteed returns but the scale of expenditure is large. Just for illustration: if at around £15,000 each we retrofit 20 million dwellings that would mean £15 billion each year at current prices from now until 2030. Set alongside the annual spend on repair, maintenance and improvement of housing, which in 2005 was almost £25 million, it starts to look a little less daunting, especially as most of these projects are also opportunities for a retrofit.

Retrofitting a dwelling for sustainability requires co-ordinated design intelligence: it is not a matter of installing a clutch of off-the-peg technical solutions. That means a key role for architects and engineers. Even when the programme has matured we must ensure that singular focus on energy efficiency does not mean losing domestic or architectural ‘soul’ of the house, and indeed that the opportunity is used to improve the design where possible and affordable. We must also maximise potential economies of scale and have in mind the external environment and landscaping in the places where the retrofit programme is undertaken. Such a holistic approach will not only be more cost effective, but will give us altogether better homes and neighbourhoods.

Sunand Prasad is president of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a senior partner at Penoyre & Prasad LLP

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment