Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
72-78)
MS JANE
FORSHAW AND
MR DAVID
ORR
13 MAY 2008
Q72 Chairman: Thank you for coming in.
Could I just kick off by asking you to what extent you think that
the need for social housing makes the target of three million
new homes by 2020 essential? Would it be your view that we cannot
achieve an adequate provision of social housing without getting
to that target?
Mr Orr: That would be my view.
We have, despite the pressures in the present market, an absolute
under supply of good quality housing in the market and a particular
under supply of good quality social housing. I think the target
of three million new homes by 2020 is of the correct magnitude—the
numbers might vary here and there. I think over the period between
now and 2020 the probability is that housing associations will
deliver perhaps a million of these new homes—not all of
them for social rent, some for shared ownership, some perhaps
for intermediate rent, some for outright sale, but the big majority
of that will be social renting. To be frank, if there is to be
any prospect of meeting three million new homes by 2020 it will
be the investment in social housing that will go the biggest way
towards meeting the gap in supply at present.
Q73 Chairman: What about the role
of eco towns, which may be quite controversial in some areas;
are they an important part of this whole expansion?
Mr Orr: They are potentially,
but we are talking about three million new homes and the number
of homes that will be supplied in eco towns might be 100,000,
150,000—it is a relatively small proportion of the total.
The importance of eco towns, as other witnesses have been saying,
is whether they become exemplars, whether they become effective,
attractive places to live, and that learning from those becomes
embedded in what we do right across the country. On their own
they could be extremely useful. But there is a danger that too
much concentration on the eco towns will take our gaze away from
making the bigger target of the three million new homes and the
good supply of affordable rented housing.
Q74 Mr Caton: English Partnerships
and housing associations have taken the lead in providing energy
efficient housing. Why do you think the government has set tougher
mandatory standards against the Code for housing associations
than for private developers? What do you think are the impacts
of this and is there any real reason why the same standards could
not be extended to private house builders now?
Ms Forshaw: Just a small question
then! I think government has found English Partnerships to be
a very good exemplar, a test bed, government's laboratory for
these kinds of new homes. You may recall that we had the Millennium
Communities which are set to deliver 9000 homes by 2014 and at
that point they were commissioned by John Prescott back in 1997.
Those were groundbreaking in their own terms, in terms of Ecohomes
Excellent. So in a similar way we are facing the carbon challenge
as government's exemplar programme and you will see from the evidence
that we are being asked to deliver zero carbon by 2013 and indeed
we have a number of schemes out in the market at the moment to
deliver for the first time zero carbon Code level 6 homes at scale.
You have heard evidence this morning that would underlie the fact
that we have developers like Barratts—and I have brought
an image here which I can explain in a moment, if you wish[42]—where
by pushing out to the market we are forcing the pace of that innovation
and forcing developers to create new relationships, often with
energy infrastructure providers, for instance, to bring in new
skill sets—the architects, the quantity surveyors—to
design a completely new product. A home of the future cannot be
a bolted-on energy micro-generation scheme to a traditional home,
and that is what these homes are about.
Mr Orr: Let me start at the end
of your suite of questions. There is no reason why the whole market
should not be producing homes to Code level 3 from now, and it
is a matter of some considerable frustration for us that that
is not the case. One does not wish to overstate this, but the
truth is that homes are being built now which are contributing
to the carbon problem and will continue to do so for the next
60 or 80 years rather than contributing to the carbon solution,
and we are doing that in an environment where we have innumerable
examples of what is achievable. The Federation published this
document—and we will leave a copy with the Secretary to
the Committee—Building Greener Homes. These are not
perfect but they are 37 different examples from around the country
from very many others that we could have used where the technology
is already in place. The real challenge is to move from thinking
in terms of demonstrations and projects to turning the learning
we already have into programmes. If housing associations will
be responsible for putting in excess of a third of new starts
on the ground in the period 2008-09 and beyond and the supply
chain is capable of meeting that level of delivery then it is
capable of meeting delivery right across the industry. And the
truth is that running two separate supply chains institutionalises
an additional cost to meeting Code level 3. There is an interesting
example. One of your earlier witnesses talked about Germany and
passive houses. They have a very extensive use of solar panels,
photovoltaic solar panels in Germany. At the rate in which we
are installing them it will take us 1500 years to meet the number
that they already have in Germany. One of the consequences of
that is that solar panels cost half what they cost in the UK because
the supply chain is geared up to delivering them and there are
10,000 people involved in producing them—a really good employment
generator. For as long as we continue to have two different time
tables then, yes, there is an argument that developments partially
funded by the public purse should be at the leading edge of the
R & D. But for as long as we have two different supply chains
we will institutionalise additional costs. So I think this is
a major problem towards meeting the targets that have been established.
Q75 Mr Caton: What you say seems
to me eminently sensible, so why do you think that neither the
government or the Home Builders Federation see the absolute logic
of it?
Mr Orr: There is a part of me
that says we have been asking the government that same question
for the last three years and not had a complete answer to it.
Some of it is about a concern that some of the smaller private
sector builders will struggle to deliver. That has certainly been
part of the line that the Home Builders Federation has advanced.
They have also advanced the line that the market is not ready,
that their customers are not looking for it; but some of the evidence
that you were getting from Richard at CABE I think demonstrates
that once people see what is possible, rather than just being
offered the theory, actually they respond to it very positively
indeed. For all of the answers we have heard I have to say that
we do not think that any of them are compelling answers. We do
know how to do Code level 3 now and we ought to be requiring it
of everyone.
Ms Forshaw: In English Partnerships
we have been specifying Code level 3 since last April and people
have made that transition easily—we have not had complaints.
We are working hard at the moment—whilst 80% of the jobs
that go out in competition from EP go to the larger house builders—with
the smaller builders to help them grow their supply chains and
help them look at what the skill gaps are to developing higher
Code levels. The point has been made this morning that to get
to that higher level of the Code, to Code 5 and 6 it is a very
different approach—it is much more about the energy infrastructure
than housing when you get up to that Code level, and that is the
massive leap we need to take to help people in imagination to
this solution.
Q76 Dr Turner: The UK-Green Building
Council has argued that giving homes that have not been assessed
against the Code for Sustainable Homes a nil rating will send
an important message to important buyers and act as a powerful
incentive to house builders to build new homes to a higher environmental
standard. What do you think of that?
Ms Forshaw: I think it can cut
in a number of ways. I think it depends on the customer. The Millennium
Communities which we have built, which are the practical, the
most Eco Excellent homes we have on the ground at the moment,
you may be aware of the Greenwich Millennium Community and the
Oxley Park development which was mentioned as an EP scheme. Where
you do not have a customer that understands the technology advantages
of the home they are buying I think they will react well to the
sense of place that is created in an English Partnerships' development.
They have quality standards that govern sustainable urban drainage,
for instance, space, green space, that I think make these places
attractive to live in, irrespective of your personal concern for
carbon. So we are getting evidence that people are seeking out
Millennium Community homes, for instance. In other respects I
think we do have a massive challenge in creating an appealing
and irresistible vision of zero carbon living if we are going
to change the culture that will make these attractive places to
live.
Q77 Dr Turner: Do you think that
that extra cost of providing onsite or district renewables in
order to qualify for zero carbon status is going to be a disincentive
towards infilling in existing towns or with individual properties
on scattered pockets of brownfield land?
Ms Forshaw: Quite frankly I do
not think we have a choice; it is the government standard. And
I think we need to get much cleverer about how we find energy
solutions. There is that interesting twist that as you get higher
up the Code these homes will be much cheaper to run but the cost
of the energy infrastructure will be more, so perversely your
energy bill may not be any less because you will have to cover
the cost of the infrastructure. If I may at this point turn to
the illustration of the Hanham Hall diagram that has been passed
round? This is the award winning first carbon challenge scheme.
Barratts have won this scheme down in Bristol—160 homes,
the first time in the UK we are building at scale. What you have
here, you can see in the background a chimney which will be the
biomass CHP boiler and they are using the existing chimney on
site, for instance. So there we have been able to capitalise on
some existing infrastructure. You also have there sustainable
urban drainage systems. It is a shame that some of your colleagues
have left—there are some nice biodiversity features here,
and on existing sustainable urban drainage schemes we have actually
been able to show that wildlife comes back—bats use the
corridors for hunting, for instance. You also have in the design
of the home, you take advantage of the sun for solar gain but
bearing in mind these homes do not need a lot of heating you need
to take account of shuttering and shading, so there you see the
shutters on the side. You have the living accommodation and the
bedrooms being on the cooler north side. You have higher roof
space here—a room and a half height to allow for better
circulation. Flexible living space, you have people being able
to work from home. This is a new way of living with an integrated
energy infrastructure that services the whole site. What would
happen there is that a home owner would pay a community charge
in to receive that energy and would be tied into that contract.
It does not just have to be energy either—it can be water,
digital services, waste collection.
Mr Orr: Can I just add that one
of the examples in this was Testway Housing. They reckon that
in a scheme of 17 homes—so a relatively small development—it
is anticipated that residents' fuel bills will be as low as £50
per annum, in an environment where many, many people—four
million plus—are officially in fuel poverty. Being able
to deliver that kind of cost energy charge is in itself a very
significant benefit, and again this is a technology that is already
there, that we are already using. I wonder if I might just have
one sentence on the certificates and the UK-Green Building Council's
view on them. It took a very long time for the market to get used
to energy ratings on white goods. I think it will take a similarly
long time—and we are in a very different kind of market.
If you go to buy a fridge there is a whole range of fridges available
but when you go to buy a house there are big issues about size,
location, what your budget looks like, that constrain the degree
of choice that you have in practice. I think it will be a long
time before the embarrassment of a nil rating will outweigh some
of the other issues.
Q78 Dr Turner: Can you comment on
the capacity that is available nationally in terms of brownfield
sites? Does this assessment take into account the individual sites
for small scale development?
Ms Forshaw: Can I say two things
there? One was when you heard the Agency speak earlier they were
quoting the figure of possibly up to one million homes on brownfield.
That does not take account of the many filters you might need
to apply to a brownfield site, and indeed some of that land from
where they are taking the figure is actually in use and it is
called "latent brownfield". So it might be that the
local authority in classifying it as a brownfield has a more ambitious
outcome for it. So it might be a scrap yard at the moment—it
is functioning, it is recycling metal—but the local authority
might want it to be housing. So those figures reflect a different
picture. The more realistic figure, based on EP's calculations,
would be something closer to 360,000 homes possible on the brownfield
land bank at the moment—just as a point of clarification.
To answer your question, the National Land Use Database collects
statistics of sites above a quarter of a hectare—so a quarter
of a football pitch—and that is based on local authority
returns. We get about an 86% response—it is quite an important
database. But actually from the analysis we did based on the 2002
returns it showed that about 55% of the sites are less than a
quarter of a hectare brownfield sites, but in area terms they
only represent about 4-6% of actual brownfield. So you often have
a lot of very small sites that could in their totality blight
an area, but in area terms the total brownfield—when you
compare it to something like a coalfield—is small.
Q79 Dr Turner: How about the problem
of prioritising urban brownfield sites that are of lesser environment
importance; can they be prioritised for development? Is this happening,
do you think?
Ms Forshaw: When you say "lesser
environment importance", in what respects?
Q80 Dr Turner: Fewer habitats lost,
less biodiversity lost, etcetera.
Ms Forshaw: We have some research
going on at the moment which is called a greenfield/brownfield
exchange. So where someone has identified a greenfield site, say
for housing, can we take a percentage of the increase in value—because
it would be cheaper to develop there, presumably—and use
it to support the additional greening up of a brownfield site?
So just use that brownfield site, dedicate it to biodiversity,
make it a part of the green infrastructure rather than try and
look at extra costs piled on to that brownfield site to bring
it back into use. Does that answer your question?
Dr Turner: I think so.
Chairman: I am sorry but we cannot continue
unfortunately in formal session with only three Members present.
Perhaps I might ask if we could submit some questions in writing
to you to cover the ground that we had hoped to cover for the
next 20 minutes or so.7 I am very grateful to you for coming in
and I am sorry you have been curtailed in this way, but what we
have covered has been extremely helpful.
7 See Ev 42.
42 Note: Picture of Hanham Hall, Bristol, development
available from English Partnerships. Back
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