Housing association says zero carbon will cost £20,000 per home
A housing association in the South of England has revealed that it will cost more than £100m to retrofit its homes so they meet the government’s net-zero target for carbon emissions by 2050.
Raven Housing Trust, which manages more than 7,000 homes in London, Surrey and Sussex, said that the £115m projected bill for energy efficiency improvements would be roughly a 25% increase in the expected £470m cost of maintenance for its stock over the coming 30 years.
Read Inside Housing’s full feature on how landlords will pay to hit zero carbon targets
It is one of the first occasions on which a social landlord has put a figure on the cost of meeting the government’s ambitious zero-carbon target, which it brought into law last year.
READ MORE
That figure, which equates to £20,000 for each of the 5,800 homes for which Raven has responsibility in terms of retrofitting, would be enough to reduce household emissions by 80%. Its chief executive Jonathan Higgs told Inside Housing that he hoped the decarbonisation of the electricity grid as a whole would then take net emissions down to zero.
Mr Higgs said that he expects Raven’s estimated cost to be slightly less than the average housing association because its homes are already more energy efficient than the sector average.
Asked about being one of the first associations to put concrete figures on the cost of the zero-carbon target, he said: “We are all in the same boat and everyone will be investing in this challenge. The quicker we get the numbers out there, the quicker we can respond to the challenge.”
Some local authorities have gone further than the government and called for carbon neutrality by 2030. In February, Greenwich Council said it would cost nearly £1bn to make all its buildings net zero by that date, amid wider calls from councils for extra money to meet the zero-carbon agenda.