Examination of Witness (Questions 526-539)
ALAN SIMPSON
MP
10 JANUARY 2007
Q526 Chairman: Can I particularly welcome
to this evidence session in the Committee's inquiry, "Climate
change: the `citizen's agenda'", the member of Parliament
for Nottingham South, Alan Simpson, a former member of this Committee
and a devout advocate of all things to do with energy saving and
many other issues connected with sustainability as well. We are
very grateful, Alan, for you giving up your time to come and give
evidence and also for the quality of the evidence that you have
submitted. It is not often that a witness brings their own personal
fan club with them, but I see that you have done that to give
you that little added extra support, and we are delighted that
they are here with us today. If you need any member of your team
to add a little bit of evidence, we can always record that for
the benefit of Hansard.
Alan Simpson: I thought I would
bring my own heckler!
Q527 Chairman: We are delighted about
that. It was a heck of a project to decide to do, but it addresses,
I think, one of the issues in terms of climate change which is
focusing on the existing built environment as opposed to new-build,
but what were the factors that motivated you to not just take
an existing property but one that was, effectively, a derelict
structure and decide to do what has now turned out to be the project
as featured in your evidence?
Alan Simpson: I think you may
describe it as a genetic defect that I have had a long-standing
interest in the regulation of older properties. There is something
that draws me to them. My interest in trying to put in renewable
energy systems dates back 30 years, but that was just tinkering
with the process. I suppose what brought it to a head in relation
to Lacemakers House was two things: it brought together work that
I have been involved in on housing poverty issues for the best
part of 30 years, which work has been continued in the Commons
largely through the work that I have done in the Warm Homes Group.
In that context what had become clear was that the Government's
programmes, both in terms of the eradication of fuel poverty and
in addressing climate change and renewable energy systems, had
already taken the low-hanging fruit, the easy work had already
been done, and since about 80 per cent of the population will
live their lives in 80 per cent of the existing housing stock,
it leaves us with about two-thirds of the existing stock that
we are going to have to do something with. I thought that, if
I am right in saying I do not believe that we have more than a
decade in which to make profound changes to the way we relate
to the built environment, then I had better start doing so myself.
So I set about looking for what I hoped would be about the worst
and hardest of starting positions, and the house that found me
certainly seemed to be that: abandoned, derelict for about 40
years, 18-inch solid brick walls, difficult to access—at
least the walls were not moving—and I thought that, if only
for demonstration purposes, people like us had to be part of the
process of driving that change.
Q528 Chairman: When you decided to
do it did you look round for experts to advise or did you sit
and look at it yourself and say, "Well, I have got a certain
amount of knowledge. This is what I want to be the end specification"?
Looking at the evidence there are two key themes that run through
it: the use of sustainable materials and, within that, if you
like, the choice of appropriate materials to give you thermal
properties within the build, and then the question of being a
net generator, that the property becomes a net generator of energy.
How did you decide on what would be the specification of this?
Who helped you to do it? What I am interested in is that you had
the advantage here almost of an untouched canvas, being that it
was a derelict building. Most people with older buildings have
got an existing structure that they are living in. The reason
I am asking these questions is that perhaps you could say a word
or two about what lessons you have learned from that project that
you think could assist in the wider question that you have just
referred to, which is what do we do with the existing housing
stock?
Alan Simpson: From where I started,
the advice that I would offer to anyone is begin with a good architect.
In that context I was extraordinarily lucky to have known for
some time the architect that I worked with on my house and with
whom we are now working to try and create a whole zero-energy
zone in the part of the city. He was absolutely pivotal in making
much of what finally happened possible. The benchmarks of the
brief, however, were benchmarks that I provided. I wanted to produce
a place that would be a net exporter of energy. I wanted to ensure
that the building itself was able to minimise its energy requirements
in terms of the quality of insulation, and the requirements to
recycle as much of the existing materials and incorporate other
people's existing materials into that process was the final add
on when I started to think seriously about ecological foot-printing
and not drawing on new resources for everything that we did.
Q529 Chairman: Coming back to the
point I made about existing housing stock, in other words people
who do not start from the position you did with a wreck but have
got their existing houses, what are the things you have distilled
out of your approach to which if somebody were to look at this
project they might say, "I could do that with my house"?
Alan Simpson: I think the things
that I have learnt are, first of all, that there is a phenomenally
exciting array of choices available to us if we start to look.
It is just that the process of looking and finding is quite hard
work. The second is that we can dramatically change the whole
picture about our relationship between the built environment and
energy systems if we do things collectively rather than individually.
I think, if I look at the process of working on my own house,
I would now say that ten times as many real, exciting opportunities
exist beyond the individual level, and so we need to be humble
enough to acknowledge that pursuing things collectively will deliver
an enormous amount more than us all setting off individually.
Finally, in the hierarchy of things that people can do with existing
properties that they live in, almost certainly it begins from
saying massively raise the insulation standards of your existing
property. In real terms you are getting something like a 15 to
20 per cent return on the capital that you invest in that as a
result of the energy savings by really high quality thermal insulation.
The second is that, in terms of the ecological relationship between
yourself as a consumer and the energy system, the easiest thing
is to switch supplier to a green energy supplier, and the third
is to move as quickly as you can into the area of local energy
systems, because the gains there are enormous.
Q530 Chairman: We are going to talk
in more detail on that, but I am going to bring David in in a
second. One final question. In actually taking your wreck and
transforming it into the project that we now have the evidence
before us about, did you have much interaction with the world
of officialdom, for example with building regulations and officials
giving sanction to what you were doing, and, if that was the case,
did you encounter any particular difficulties or were people in
Nottingham very encouraging to what you were doing?
Alan Simpson: I ought to put on
record a word of praise to the Planning Department in Nottingham.
Many of us will find reasons not to praise the planners, but I
have to say that, given the difficulties of the building, the
site, the fact that it is in the middle of a conservation area,
they were very sympathetic and supportive of bringing the building
back into effective use. They were quite clear about the terms
and constraints that had to be adhered to within the conservation
area. We, in turn, worked very strictly to meeting those criteria
and things went through very, very positively. It would be completely
unfair of me to say anything other than very positive things about
my experience of the planning process, but I suspect, again, much
of that was down to the fact that, from the start, I worked alongside
an extremely good visionary architect.
Q531 Chairman: What is the value
of the project?
Alan Simpson: In commercial terms
or personal terms?
Q532 Chairman: No, I was interested
in terms of how much has it cost, to give us a flavour of what
has been involved. I suppose the interesting question would be
if you had been able to do a costing of doing it up conventionally,
bringing it back into habitable use versus what you have done,
perhaps to try and establish the degree of on-cost?
Alan Simpson: Perhaps the easiest
thing is to talk about the difference rather than the actual costs.
The estimate that we have made is that it cost about £30,000
more to do all of the environmental work. That included a complete
solar roof that generates just over three kilowatts of electricity
per hour, the incorporation of the micro-CHP complementary heating
system and the internal and external levels of render and insulation
and the water recycling. In all, all of those measures came to
about £30,000.
Chairman: That is very helpful.
Q533 David Taylor: There will be
a fair number of lessons, Alan, from your experience in terms
of how best to approach, possibly, the major upgrading of existing
housing stock. One of the main hassles for anyone that has lived
in a house when major work is going on is the sheer inconvenience
of it all. How long did the project take from almost taking occupation
of the site to moving in, and at what point did you move in? Was
work still going on around you? This is a serious point.
Alan Simpson: No, this was an
extremely serious point. It took 18 months to two years in total.
I will not pretend that it did not overrun, we had least a six-month
overrun, and at the end there were real concerns that we had as
a family about which would arrive first, the stairs or the baby.
In the end it was the baby.
Q534 David Taylor: At what point
did you move in, in practical terms?
Alan Simpson: Just after the stairs!
No, we moved in when our daughter was about a month old and we
should have moved in about six months before she was born. I think
to describe it as fraught would be mild. It was a big project
and a tough and disruptive course.
Q535 David Taylor: Particularly with
housing stock you would normally want to have some buffer properties
into which you could decant the current people and then to do
the work.
Alan Simpson: I think that is
interesting, because that is what we have moved on to in relation
to the Meadows zero-energy zone proposal. That would be to take
4,000 existing properties and to try to turn them into a zero-energy
zone in ways that do not necessarily involve massive disruption.
In terms of energy generating systems, you could fit a solar roof,
you could fit a ground source heat pump, you could fit air source
heat pumps. If we look at wind generation, I think the economics
of individual wind generators on properties do not make any particular
sense in cities. What we are looking at there is a community wind
generator, the likes of which they have, fairly commonly, in Germany.
Certainly there would be common ownership of this, which is not
disruptive of individual households. You cannot get away with
non-disruption at all, but for solid, brick properties I suspect
that you are talking about external render, and that again can
be done in ways that have minimal disruption to the internal living
arrangements.
Q536 David Lepper: Alan, you have
emphasised the importance of the architect, you have described
the architect as "visionary". Have you formed a view,
or does your architect have a view—I wonder if you have
discussed it—about the extent to which the trade and education
of architects is sympathetic to the kinds of work that your architect
has been doing? Is your architect a loner, ploughing a lone furrow?
Alan Simpson: No, I do not think
the architects are necessarily the problem on this. There are
real problems with developers and the brief that developers give
to architects. I have taken some of this through already with
the confidences of the construction industry. Basically, I have
suggested to them that their relationship to society is pretty
much one of the relationship between the car thief and the car
owner. They are in the process of stealing as much as they can
from the public regulatory system to get away with building on
the cheap and for short-term profit, leaving the rest of society
to pay massively the long term cost, including the running costs.
When I talk to architects about this their response is to say,
"Just change the rules of the game. You guys make the rules.
Just change them." This is happening all across Europe. We
are the only ones, in a European context, who have a rules base
in our society that almost chases the cheap and cheerless. I do
not think you would find any objections in the architects' world.
There would be screams amongst developers, but precisely the same
developers are building buildings in other parts of Europe to
substantially higher qualities than we require them to build in
the UK and, in the context of Germany, are building them and incorporating
energy generating systems within them as a matter of course.
Q537 Lynne Jones: In relation to
architecture, your house is in a conservation area but I take
it your insulation was internal?
Alan Simpson: No, both.
Q538 Lynne Jones: I do not know whether
there are any features on the house, but if you are doing retro
fitting and you are doing external insulation or even doing internal
insulation, one of the problems may be the alteration in the character
of older buildings or buildings in conservation areas or listed
buildings?
Alan Simpson: We did not have
any of those problems. The character of other buildings within
the conservation area was a mixture of external facings, some
of which had already been rendered, some of which were retained
brick, so our proposals to put in the external rendering just
had to be consistent with the character of the buildings that
had been rendered within the conservation area.
Q539 Lynne Jones: Have you any thoughts
on those houses where you have got, for example, external features
where it would be detrimental to the character of the building
to render over?
Alan Simpson: We went to look
at some buildings in Germany that had had to deal with that as
an issue, and they have been developing a different form of insulation,
which is a form of polystyrene sandwich which is very thin but
has a bubble-wrap centre to it filled with sort of anti-freeze
liquid. I do not know, but the whole rationale of it is that they
can produce current Scandinavian levels of insulation in coats
that are maybe two centimetres thick, so that would obviate the
need to put it on externally; you would be able to do it internally.
Chairman: Are you going to buy one, Patrick?
You were looking very surprised.
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