Examination of Witnesses (Questions 121
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 23 JUNE 2004
DR DAVID
CROWHURST, MR
DAVID WARRINER
AND MS
DEBORAH BROWNHILL
Q121 Chairman: We are grateful to
you for coming and also for the memorandum which you submitted.
Can I begin by referring to the mission that you have which is
to promote excellence and innovation. We would be very interested
in your thoughts on whether this is a message and a mission which
finds a receptive audience in the building industry.
Mr Warriner: Yes, I think it does
with some sectors. The problem of the industry is that it is so
diverse and so disparate. There are clearly some leading edge
players for whom innovation is very much their every day bread
and butter. There is a vast majority of the industry which has
little interest in innovation and merely wishes to turn out stock
solutions. Clearly we are targeting those who are already converted
but equally trying to raise the standard of the majority as well.
Q122 Chairman: Why do you think there
is such a range of different types of behaviour when clearly those
who are at the cutting edge, who are doing the right things, are
doing so not only because it is good for the environment but also
because it is good for their bottom line? Why has the message
not filtered down?
Mr Warriner: I presume because
many of them feel that their business is perfectly sustainable
without doing so until some pressure comes on them that changes
that. I think you are right; those who are doing it are seeking
that edge. Unfortunately in many cases I guess they do not feel
the need to seek that edge; they are able to sustain their current
business. I think it is also a major issue about knowledge and
expertise in being able to do some of those things and that is
clearly where we see one of our major roles.
Q123 Chairman: Do you think you are
as effective as you would like to be in spreading the word about
good practice?
Mr Warriner: I think we are very
effective in those areas where we have targeted programmes. The
big issue with any sort of thing like that is that it has to be
funded in some way. Energy (which is funded) is quite a good area
and there are some very effective programmes. In others it may
not be quite so.
Q124 Chairman: The WWF told us last
week that there are a lot of companies that only do the right
thing if they are made to. Would you agree with that?
Mr Warriner: I think the industry
certainly likes a level playing field. In many cases it does not
like to feel that it is doing something it does not need to do
and that is often an argument about Building Regulations: it provides
a floor that everybody at least knows where they are starting
from and what they have to do. I think there is inevitably some
truth in the fact that many will only do the minimum they think
they need to do.
Q125 Chairman: In your view is it
true what Barker said in her interim report that house builders'
profitability depends on obtaining valuable land rather than building
a higher quality product in ever more efficient ways?
Ms Brownhill: I think it probably
is true. She is the economist; we are scientists in this. There
is not a premium or an incentive for house builders normally to
build to higher sustainability standards in terms of the economics.
Q126 Mr Challen: Barker says in one
of her recommendations that there ought perhaps to be a windfall
tax on land sales where the price is increased through the permission
given to it for house building. Having myself recently looked
at house builders' profits which have gone up tremendously in
the last five years, do you think there is any mileage for extending
this principle of the windfall tax to other areas like house builders'
profits so that that money could be recycled into higher standards
or environmental purposes and things of that sort?
Ms Brownhill: I think the idea
of windfall tax on planning gain is not actually a new idea. I
think there was legislation a number of years ago which did implement
a tax like that. I am not exactly sure why that ceased to be and
it is obviously the land owners are the ones who make huge profits
from doing nothing; they merely convert the land from agricultural
land into building land. There is a huge amount of money in the
system that could be used to support neighbourhood combined heat
and power schemes or renewable energy programmes or higher sustainable
development in terms of social and economic aspects. The house
builders will certainly argue that their profits are more inconsistent
than that. Sometimes they do make a lot of money and at the moment
they are doing, but if you look back to the late 80s then they
certainly were not making much money and things were problematic
for them. We certainly looked at some fiscal incentives in work
that we did with the WWF which looked at fiscal incentives that
the Government could implement to encourage green development
like a reduction of the stamp duty if a house met a certain high
standard or other such Treasury incentives. That has remained
as a recommendation; it has not really been picked up by the Government
so far. There are fiscal incentives that could be introduced that
would help to pay for some of the sustainability costs but these
costs in our experience are greatly exaggerated. We have some
information on costs if that would be helpful to the Committee.
Q127 Chairman: It certainly would.
Ms Brownhill: We have a label
that ranks housing on how sustainable it is on a scale of good
to excellent and we have information on the costs of achieving
each different standard that was produced by the Housing Corporation
and sustainable homes so it is nothing to do with us and it has
not had any vested interest or house builders producing that information.
It has just been produced for the common good of housing associations.
At the moment with a favourable site—which means the sort
of infrastructure, local facilities and public transport provision
that the LGA were talking about which is so important to sustainability—in
order to get an excellent on our scale for the housing (because
we measure those local aspects as well in our label) then it costs
about £1,800 per property to raise it from where Building
Regulations are now to what we would call our "Excellent"
standard. That is not a lot of money in the build costs; we worked
out that it is less than 3% even if you take quite a low build
cost which would more reflect the Midlands that the south east.
Q128 Mr Challen: Do you have any
evidence—although it may not be in your remit—to show
whether or not the public, if they were offered a choice between
a common or garden current cheapskate house building job and a
good BedZed style building, whether they would pay a premium for
that?
Ms Brownhill: The only evidence
that I do have is that I have worked closely with the development
of Milton Keynes over the years—over quite a lot of years
now—and we had a development called Energy World in the
80s which was one of the first large scale developments of energy
efficient housing with the new technologies in it. For many years
in Milton Keynes—and even still now—houses on Energy
World sold at a 3% premium. So there is some evidence that provided
the publicity is there—the Milton Keynes Development Corporation
had a huge amount of money to publicise that, it was on television,
it grabbed the imagination of the public—then yes, there
is some evidence to show that people will pay that.
Q129 Chairman: What changes would
you like to see to Building Regulations?
Ms Brownhill: We believe Building
Regulations is a good mechanism for having some statutory minimum
level that is a level playing field. In terms of sustainability
in the round—which is what we try to address with our label
EcoHomes—because it is such a broad subject we think it
would be difficult to encompass everything within the legislative
constraints of Building Regulations. For example, the building
control officer at the moment can only look at that individual
house; he cannot consider whether there are local facilities close
by or whether it is well served by public transport. His legislative
remit does not allow him to do that. We believe that a number
of extra indicators could be included in Building Regulations
to set the minimum, but on top of that a voluntary label that
goes further or, if you want to make it more mandatory but not
via regulation, would be a mechanism to address all these other
aspects which are quite often difficult to build into Building
Regulations.
Q130 Chairman: I think the Egan report
recommended that Government should aim to achieve carbon emissions
and waste minimisation standards consistent with a sustainable
one planet level within eight years. Do you think that is feasible?
Dr Crowhurst: I think that may
well be an optimistic target, but setting targets that are optimistic
are a good way of driving improvement so one would not want to
downplay the importance of trying to achieve that and apply any
sort of blame if we do not actually achieve it. We need to work
towards that sort of level but whether it is really achievable
within eight years I would suspect that is being optimistic.
Q131 Chairman: What are the principal
reasons why it might not be achieved?
Dr Crowhurst: I think there are
practical considerations. The public would need to be engaged
in that aim. The design considerations in terms of reducing waste
would need to be engaged so there are many, many different factions
that need to be engaged if that process is going to be achieved.
It would be a significant effort in order to engage all those
that need to be involved in that process.
Ms Brownhill: Especially in house
building. It involves a significant change of operational procedures
which traditionally have been quite slow to change. Even with
full fiscal incentives and everything else we reckon it is about
a 20 year timescale to get anything moved significantly in the
housing industry from start to finish, to get, say, 80% penetration
of any particular activity even when that is well-funded and well-publicised.
The time lag to get it in there is quite long in our experience.
Q132 Chairman: Are you talking there
about technological barriers?
Ms Brownhill: No, I am talking
about skills barriers, attitudinal barriers, practical barriers
of the manufacturing process; the way people are used to working
and the way manufacturing works and what happens on sites with
on-site processes and skills that people have at every level.
At every level there would need to be a lot of re-training and
a raising of the level of skills particular in the housing market.
You asked about the construction market, that is split into the
construction and the housing market, and there are quite different
skill levels in those two parts of the construction industry.
Dr Crowhurst: I think it is probably
the attitudinal aspects which are harder to fix and as important.
It is an objective that we need to move towards.
Q133 Mr Thomas: In that context do
you have a vision of how things might be in, say, 20 or 25 years'
time? You have talked about now and eight years which seems to
be problematical. Do you have, as an establishment, a vision of
where we could be getting over that slightly longer timescale?
Ms Brownhill: We do have visions
about what we think sustainability is for housing or for building.
We obviously do not get involved in the same level of master planning
that the Local Government Association would but we also have a
vision on how we think planning could be improved to help the
processes and we have definitions and tools of how to measure
sustainability—for want of a better word—that we would
like to see implemented in a whole scale way. I think to say that
anyone has the one answer to sustainable development is a bit
of a tall order.
Dr Crowhurst: If I have a vision—I
suspect this is a personal one rather than a BRE one—it
is that when establishing plans for future development that we
first of all make sure that there is that need for development—there
is a societal need for that development—and when we do do
that we make it environmentally sound so that we are mitigating
the environmental impacts and use of resources to achieve that
and but also taking account of the economics through looking at
that sensible through whole life cost measures rather than the
narrow capital first cost measures. That is the sort of model
of sustainability which takes into account social, environmental
and economic needs.
Q134 Mr Thomas: That is a bit attitudinal
again.
Dr Crowhurst: There is a lot to
change in terms of both attitudes of professionals but also attitudes
of the public. Whilst I think the public are increasingly aware
of environmental issues, how effectively to deal with them is
not always necessarily within the public grasp, nor might one
expect every member of the public to have the same grasp.
Q135 Mr Thomas: To get to that stage—whichever
that vision may be—surely one of the key things that we
need to be dedicating some resources towards is research into
sustainable construction. How much are we in this country dedicating
to sustainable construction? How much money is being allocated
either by yourselves or government towards research and how does
that compare with other countries? Are we doing enough?
Mr Warriner: I do not think we
are doing anywhere near enough. One of the problems at the current
time is that there has been a reduction in the available funding
for research into construction generally but sustainability in
particular.
Q136 Mr Thomas: Is that a recent
phenomenon?
Mr Warriner: Yes, relatively recent;
over the last three or four years.
Dr Crowhurst: Four years ago we
had a programme which, at that time, would have been of the order
of a million pounds—slightly more—of government funded
research and some policy support. Over that four year period that,
I am afraid to say, has dwindled to nothing.
Q137 Mr Thomas: Nothing at all?
Dr Crowhurst: A few thousands
of pounds. That is not to say that there is not government funded
work being done from various agencies in support of the environmental
impacts and issues that might broadly be included in sustainability.
It does seem to me that that approach has become particularly
fragmented since the responsibility for areas in terms of sustainability
were seemingly separated from what was the old DETR and has now
become DEFRA, ODPM, DTI and probably a number of other departments.
Q138 Mr Thomas: Is your impression
that the overall global standard has decreased or is it simply
fragmented and it is in a lot of different places and maybe not
being as effectively used in that way? Or is it that they have
simply shifted the funding from yourselves and given it to another
wonderful body that can do this work just as well?
Mr Warriner: I think our impression
is that the money has dropped.
Ms Brownhill: Programmes have
been dropped.
Mr Warriner: There is no longer
a specific construction related programme and our understanding
is that that money has been absorbed into the broader DTI programme
and therefore is probably being spread across a wider range of
industrial sectors rather than focus on construction.
Dr Crowhurst: Also perhaps there
is a different emphasis now evident within the DTI on the research
that is needed in support of the construction industry in terms
of acceptable, making it more profitable, more productive but
not necessarily directed towards achieving objectives such as
overall sustainability in construction.
Q139 Mr Thomas: What about training?
Dr Crowhurst: I think my colleague
mentioned earlier that training is a particular issue. I know
that the skills councils are looking at the training needs of
the construction industry and those related to the construction
industry. The skills need to go right through, not just the contractors
but also into the planning departments and the building control
so that they can adequately assess the solutions that are being
put forward to them. There is work being done to look at ways
to address that skills shortage but there is still some way to
go.
Ms Brownhill: We have trained
about a thousand building professionals so far on a two-day course
to either look at EcoHomes which is the environmental rating for
housing, or BREEAM which is the environmental rating for commercial
building. There are training programmes going on from our side
and they are always full at the moment. Every course we run is
full so there would be plenty of material for wide scale training
programmes to happen if there were sufficient push from government
or whoever.
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