Retrofit rethink

Q: Tell us about your Great British Refurb campaign…

A: The campaign is partly about grant aid, partly about tax and partly about getting the skills and accredited workers. We’re aiming to get half a million homes refurbished to green standards by 2020, so we’re there for the long haul. Clearly, getting informed policy into government white papers is a key part of the campaign. Whether or not you actually get there by a certain date is less important than having a target to form an objective for industry, as well as raising public awareness.

Q: Do you think there is much public awareness of the need to retrofit?

A: I think it is on people’s radar - partly because of the lack of energy security, partly because of the high cost of maintaining and running homes that are leaking energy.

Fossil fuel allowed people to be profligate. If you have to grow your own fuel - and we grow fuel for our wood burners - then you have to chop it down first, then you have to chop it up. Between the hedgerow and the fire there about four wheelbarrow journeys. It really teaches how valuable the energy that goes into the fuel is!

Q: What is the biggest challenge involved in refurbishment?

A: Modern houses have, without even trying, twice or three times the energy efficiency of older homes because they are properly built, properly air-tight and properly insulated.

So part of our message is how we devise a solution for all types of homes. Across Britain we have the greatest diversity of typology in the world, it is quite extraordinary. If we’re not careful we will end up with an attempt to make one size fit all and, of course, that will fail.

What I would like to see is the The Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors working with local communities. If you live in a Victorian terrace, it is likely that the next few houses and the next few streets will have been built by the same developer. Then we can choose solutions that are proper to a street, to a community.

Q: Do social landlords have a part to play?

A: If you look at the traditional social landlord model, where one housing association or council might own a block or a few streets, you can see the appeal of being able to put them together and tackle them. It also tends to be easier for social landlords to retrofit than private landlords, because they can decant people.

I’ve been to see one or two projects with only minimal intervention - the social landlords have just taken out the boiler of a house and put in an air source heat pump. The pump cuts bills by half and it is a really straightforward intervention.

One of the appealing things about the community acting together is that they can then be interdependent and support each other - ‘if you’re having your kitchen done a I’ll bring a cup of tea’, or ‘you can pop over the road to have a shower’. And, of course, social landlords have the benefits of volume.

Q: What is your house like - has it had an eco-refurb?

A: I am sitting in the window of my sitting room - because it is the only place I can get a mobile phone signal - and the walls are three foot, and there is no cavity. The floor beneath me is stone. It was built in the 1500s. It is one of those buildings that needs lots of air change – I can’t bring the insulation up to the levels I would like because it needs to breathe.

We’ve draft-proofed it really thoroughly, the doors, the windows, and even that has made quite difference. We have done that very old-fashioned thing of having very thick, heavy curtains. I haven’t fitted slimline double glazing, as much as I would like to. I am not a conservationist to the point that I think we should keep all our old glass – you have to make compromises. Shutters are also very efficient. We have got wood-burners and a biomass boiler.

Fossil fuel allowed people to be profligate. If you have to grow your own fuel – and we grow fuel for our wood burners, then you have to chop it down first, then you have to chop it up. Between the hedgerow and the fire there about four wheelbarrow journeys. It really teaches how valuable the energy that goes into the fuel is.

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