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.
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