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Climate change: why there is no longer a hiding place
The time for the industry to get serious about its response to the climate crisis is now, says Tony Stacey
In a well-judged article for Inside Housing last month, Julian Ashby challenged social landlords by saying that the sector might care about climate change, but that we do not have a plan for moving towards net-zero emissions. He is absolutely right.
But why haven’t we? We have a plan for just about everything else.
The truth is that it has just felt too difficult – the kind of thing, perhaps, that busy chief executives felt could safely be left for their successors to deal with.
But now, at least, we have had the scale of the challenge scoped for us and we can look at the problem fully in the face.
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It would have been easy to miss the Sustainable Energy Association’s report this month entitled Social Housing’s Contribution to Stopping the Climate Crisis, which asked: “What do social housing organisations need to do to get their stock to carbon zero by 2050?”
The report considered four responses. The only course of action that actually works is extremely ambitious.
It requires a combination of a deep retrofit programme for existing stock (bringing all the homes up to at least EPC Band C), far higher standards for space heating in new builds (effectively taking them to Passivhaus standards) and a radical transition to low-carbon heating.
There are three elements that need to be in place if we are to make this ambition a reality.
The first is the adoption of the right technological solutions.
“There is a real danger that we back the wrong horses and end up commissioning the housing equivalent of Betamax videos at scale”
Understandably, this is the area where most of our energies have been focused. It is right that we have been testing different approaches to new build, sources of energy, retrofit and working with tenants in the process.
There is a real danger that we back the wrong horses and end up commissioning the housing equivalent of Betamax videos at scale.
The second element is effective financial planning. I stand to be corrected, but I have yet to come across a housing organisation that has plugged the costs of getting its stock to carbon zero by 2050 into its business plan.
My guess is this: were any landlord to do so, it would show the organisation going bankrupt many times over. Until now most of us have settled for relatively limited budgets to fund pilots, but if housing is not to be complicit, we need to start thinking about how on earth we can fund work at this scale.
As a starting point, I suggest that organisations try plugging in just the costs of bringing older stock up to code level C and seeing what happens. My guess is that many associations’ development programmes will no longer be viable. Boards will then need to consider whether this is a price worth paying. There are some very, very uncomfortable choices ahead of us.
Finally, there is sector leadership – both at a national and local level. Our trade bodies and professional organisations have yet to meet this challenge head-on.
The green agenda has generally been tucked away underneath other generic strategic themes such as ‘quality’. Will the National Housing Federation and others now respond?
“We need to take the climate crisis out of the ‘too difficult to think about’ box”
At a local level, collaboration must be the way ahead. We can work together on partnering arrangements for commissioning new homes, swap experiences with each other about new technologies and, most critically, plan how we are going to work together with tenants on this complex issue.
Generally speaking, our tenants are among the poorest people in society. It is far easier for people on higher incomes to contemplate greener purchasing decisions.
Many of our customers will feel that they have little choice but to drive older cars, for example. Purchasing decisions around food, energy and clothing may also take them to less sustainable products. If we ever needed to stand together with tenants, it is now.
We need to take the climate crisis out of the ‘too difficult to think about’ box.
The solutions are very unclear, particularly given the lack of leadership at government level. Making progress is incredibly problematic – the biggest challenge of our lifetimes.
But we just can’t duck it any more.
Tony Stacey, chief executive, South Yorkshire Housing Association
