Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 40-54)

MR JACK PRINGLE AND MR BILL GETHING

12 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q40  John Cummings: If that is the case, how do you believe it is possible for the Government to persuade 17 million individual householders to insulate their lofts, fill their walls and upgrade their windows?

  Mr Pringle: Indeed, that is the absolute question. What systematic way can the Government bring to bear in this?

  Q41  John Cummings: Do you think financial incentives could be part and parcel of the package?

  Mr Pringle: Professor Power talked about what is happening in Germany. We have looked at Germany too, and for the cost of about £1 billion a year, they are aiming to convert 5% per annum of the existing stock. That is one way, but I would like to point out that if you look back over the last, say, 30 years, the transformation that has already gone on in the housing stock, from coke boilers to natural gas boilers, the amount of double glazing that has gone on, how everybody has insulated their loft, vast change has happened in recent memory, so to say that by 2050 we can make substantial changes is not unimaginable. It is not unimaginable that we can make those changes.

  Q42  John Cummings: So you really believe that it is possible for the Government to persuade home owners to invest in expensive products that will not provide any financial benefit for perhaps 10, 20 or in some cases 30 years?

  Mr Gething: Did not the Stern review suggest that we need to change the market? In today's market of cheap energy the financial equations are not very attractive. Also, people are obsessed with paybacks, and I can quite understand why but you never expect a payback from your plasma TV, for example.

  Mr Pringle: I would also like to point out that vast numbers of people have invested in the worst payback measure they could have done, which is double glazing and UPVC windows. As a measure it has the longest possible payback period, yet people have volunteered to do that. It is because of a view they have on the investment quality into their house and comfort standards, and I think if the rest of the packages can be tied to investment in the house and comfort standards, then you would get people wanting to do it too.

  Q43  John Cummings: With windows you can see a positive benefit to the house. It becomes quite sexy to have a particular sort of UPVC windows or hardwood windows. It attracts people. I am not quite sure about wall insulation, which you cannot see.

  Mr Gething: No, insulation is not sexy, but it is important.

  Chair: I really do not think we want to get into a discussion about whether it is or not!

  Q44  Sir Paul Beresford: In some countries both in the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere there is peer pressure, and that is combined with an understanding of some of the more complicated things, like heat pumps and solar electric roofing arrangements and solar water arrangements, et cetera. Can we move down that sort of way? It is certainly happening in some of the colder climates in the northern hemisphere but in some of the cooler and more temperate as well as some of the warmer climates in the southern hemisphere.

  Mr Pringle: I think peer pressure follows awareness and you can see that happening already. It is happening in the vehicle markets. I think there needs to be an awareness campaign in the household market about what is a sensible thing to do, what is a smart thing to do, what is an intelligent thing to do, what is a responsible thing to do and then you will get peer pressure.

  Q45  Sir Paul Beresford: Part of it is also to get an explanation over. If you say to someone "You need a heat pump system" and you are in Australia or New Zealand, they understand what you are talking about. If you say it here, you get the blankest look you could think of.

  Mr Pringle: Indeed.

  Mr Gething: But actually, here heat pumps are slightly "iffy" if you are on gas. There are some quite complicated technical arguments. One of the potential drivers will be the Energy Services Directive, which, as I understand it, will require energy providers to provide benchmarks. When you get your gas bill, it would say "You are using too much gas compared with the benchmark. How about considering these issues?" It could offer or point you in the direction of grants or finance. All this needs to be tied together in a co-ordinated package and it is trying to get the information to people at the right time and pointing them in very clear directions.

  Q46  Mr Betts: Do you have a way you think that should be done? This is absolutely key. You in your profession ought to understand these things but many people put double glazing in on the strength of the salesman who knocks on the door and gives them supposed advice, hardly independent, and it may not be very cheap advice either. Some of these things are actually much more complicated for people to understand and which one you do, which route you go down. As you said, in some cases certain technology may not be appropriate for a certain type of property with a certain type of heating in it. How do you think this advice ought to be delivered in a way that will benefit people and make things happen?

  Mr Pringle: I think there is a skills gap. There is an information gap and a skills gap. There is a skills gap in the profession at the moment because all the professions have existed in a world where they have not had to carry out low-energy designs, and yet almost immediately, within the space of one or two years, a completely new design technology needs to be brought to bear. That is one of the reasons we as an Institute have been investing in low carbon design tools for our profession, to say "If you are going to do this sort of project, these are the sorts of measures you need to look at, these are the sorts of technologies that you need to get hold of." I think that also needs to go further into information that can be promulgated to householders about what technologies would be suitable for their type of house. Professor Power has said there are about 20 different housing typologies, from terraced houses to semi-detached to timber frame. Each of them needs to have a slightly different approach. It is quite complicated and I think we need to invest—and it will take a few million pounds to do it—in, typology by typology, the sort of measures that you could take to existing houses that both householders and professionals or builders could grab and say, "That is what I can do with that type of house. I now understand the way forward." One of the issues we have in this country is that a lot of our existing building stock is quite historic and has quite a character to it. We do not have the convenience that perhaps parts of Germany have where you have rendered, in other words, plastered and painted, outsides of houses that you can very simply over-clad with thick insulation. We have an added difficulty here with our housing stock that we would not want to do that to brick elevations and to completely change the visual character of neighbourhoods, so we have to do something slightly more complicated to the inside of the house to get the same return.

  Q47  John Pugh: Can I just follow through on that point? It strikes me that we have to accept the fact that some housing is going to be more energy-intensive than others. If we all lived in thatched cottages with tiny little windows and very small rooms, we could save a hell of a lot of energy but there are not many of us who are actually going to make that choice, and some of us prefer large houses with patios and all sorts of things like that which are necessarily going to consume more energy. Given that people choose their houses because they like the houses, they like the living environment that the houses represent to them, is it not really incumbent on somebody to do models of best practice for particular sorts of housing? In terms of older housing, there are two things you can do. You can deface it utterly and turn it into something different or you can work with the grain. If you were a householder and you were looking not to change your house radically but, without changing your house radically, to make the best of it, where would be the best place to look for the perfect model of good practice?

  Mr Pringle: We also think those models need to be drawn up, which is what I was talking about earlier. I turn to Bill: what do you think are the models of good practice?

  Mr Gething: The Energy Saving Trust has done quite a lot of work and they have produced a very fine leaflet about best practice in energy efficient renewables.

  Q48  John Pugh: That is precisely my point. They tend to say general things like reduce the size of your ceilings and so on. In certain houses you are not going to do that. In some houses you cannot reduce the size of the ceilings because the ceiling is low enough as it is. What you are looking for is selling more tailor-made to specific sorts of housing, whether it is older housing or whether it is housing of a particular sort you just simply prefer. The generalities we all know, do we not?

  Mr Pringle: I think at the moment you come to an architect that specialises in that type of work for advice.

  Q49  John Pugh: It is a very expensive way of finding out.

  Mr Gething: Less than 17.5%, I think you'll find!

  Mr Pringle: The initial advice is not necessarily that expensive. If you want an architect to carry out the whole project for you, that is another set of decisions but you can get just advice about what would be most appropriate from skilled architects working in the field. I think it returns to the earlier point. I think there is a real need for exemplars for each building type, for each housing type, from your thatched cottage to your terraced house to your glazed, modern construction, and then householders need not go to what you would call expensive professionals; they would have a reference.

  Q50  John Pugh: I live in a town where practically all of it is Victorian and most of the householders are not going to go to their own bespoke architect and say "What can we do here?" What they really want to do is to go down to B&Q and buy what will work in their house that does not involve radical design, the loss of high ceilings and all that sort of stuff, and there is not that sort of ready-made advice, specifically tailored for them available, I do not think.

  Mr Gething: I think you could do, as Jack has said, a systematic approach to this which could feed into exactly the sorts of things I was talking about earlier, like your advice when you get your energy bill. The other thing one should note is that the Energy Saving Trust did some work looking at what they call "extreme refurbishment" to try and find examples around the country of the sort of things we are going to have to do to our buildings if we are going to hit the 60%. They found six in the entire country.

  Q51  John Pugh: What is extreme refurbishment of a pre-1919 house?

  Mr Gething: Again, these tend to be done by enthusiasts and they vary hugely, which is interesting. Someone will put 250 mm of insulation in their floor, someone will put 400 mm of insulation in their roof, and some of the architectural consequences are pretty staggering: you end up with tubes to windows. Only one of those six has been monitored. One of the things we really do have a problem with is that we talk anecdotally about the problem and there is some information, the English House Condition Survey, there is some information out there but it seems to me that there is a lot more information out there on actual energy consumption in buildings and building types and statistical information which we do not pull together and therefore I think we are working a bit in the dark. We are guessing at the answers when I think there needs to be a more considered and consistent tackling of the issue.

  Q52  John Pugh: My suspicion is we are not working sufficiently with the grain of human nature. People, certainly in smaller Victorian houses, will think of things which you would not recommend, such as knocking down a partition wall because they want a larger room and things like that, which of course will be more problematic to build. They will do silly things like putting in PVC windows because they do not need painting as often as the old wooden ones did. So there are plusses but to give them a whole series of handouts saying "There is lagging available, chaps" will not get them to do the practical things that are needed.

  Mr Gething: Yes. This illustrates the problem of where to put the information out, because a lot of this work will be, in effect, the DIY market or the "white van" market and those are areas which are traditionally very difficult. There is no logical roll-out programme to get this information out to these people. Part of this will come from what we were saying earlier about making people aware that there is a push, that there is a Government policy to deal with this issue over the long term and we are starting now, but at the moment there is no feeling that there is a consistent approach that the Government is taking that we need to make progress.

  Q53  Chair: Can I ask you finally, do you think there are some houses that are so inefficient and so unable to be made efficient that they should just be demolished and replaced?

  Mr Pringle: There are some houses, clearly, listed buildings, that are so inefficient but so worth keeping that exceptions need to be made of them and at the other end of the scale I am sure there are houses which are beyond hope, and it might be better to take them down and rebuild them but I do not think they are in the forefront of our minds. We think most of the existing building stock is susceptible to treatment and, if it is not, it is probably pretty poor stuff anyway.

  Mr Olner: We spoke about housing and obviously that is what we are looking at but do you have a comparator as to how energy-inefficient industries, commerces, compare to households and do you think more could be done to perhaps target that to get a more sustainable withdrawal of using carbon dioxide?

  Q54  Chair: Can I just turn that round, as we are supposed to be looking at housing, and say do you think that the contribution of existing housing to our energy consumption is sufficiently important that we need to be doing more about it, or are there other bits that we should be concentrating on first?

  Mr Pringle: Undeniably, this is the most important agenda. If it is 27% CO2 output at the moment and we are going to have 80-odd per cent of the existing stock still here in 2050, that means the existing buildings are going to be contributing, by my calculation, about 25% still in 2050. This is a huge proportion of our carbon output and it should be prioritised.

  Mr Gething: I think there is a subsequent point that tackling the carbon challenge needs to be done across the piece and at the moment it is rather parcelled up and it feels like the building industry is being specifically targeted as potentially a quick win. I suppose if you turn the question round the other way, if you do not do anything with the existing stock, where do you get the 60% from? You would have to stop making anything, I suspect. Again, it would be good to see government joined up across the piece.

  Chair: Indeed. Thank you very much.






 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2008
Prepared 2 April 2008