[Philip Newbold]

Excellent article Gary but what did you honestly expect from the Greenest Government Ever?

If it weren't for the vociferous lobbying of Ministers by the Government's wealthy pals in the construction and energy industries, Part L of our Building Regulations would have been ramped up to require Passivhaus standards of thermal insulation and air tightness. As a result, we do not have a snowball in Hell's chance of our de-skilled construction industry getting anywhere near building zero carbon new homes by 2016 or zero carbon non-domestic buildings by 2018. Just like all the other “Green Crap” that this Government has jettisoned to keep standards low and profits high, these aspirations will quietly be done away with over the next couple of years, along with the CfSH

In common with many other Building Designers, I will not mourn the passing of the CfSH as it has made a negligible contribution to energy conservation. Anyone who thinks that having a bike rack in your garage and a clothes line in your garden is going to save the planet is, at the very least, misguided. As a voluntary code, the housing developers think they are doing us all a favour by offering badly-built, Code 3 “affordable” homes with tiny rooms and energy demands which will plunge their occupants into fuel poverty in just a few years. I have avoided this fate by self-building my own Code 5, Band A, (non-certified) passive house which costs less than £100 a year for heating and hot water

Anyway, back to materials. While I would, in general, support some form of environmental standard on all building materials, for the reasons outlined above, this is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. The UK building industry is at least 25 years behind the rest of Europe in so many ways and now the catching up process is so expensive and disruptive, it is not going to happen anytime soon. The car industry has enforced strict standards of labelling on vehicle components so that they can be recycled more easily at the end of a vehicle's life. Following on from that, most of us will consider paying more for a car (or washing machine or fridge) that uses less energy but for some unknown reason we are not prepared to pay more for a home that uses less energy, thanks partly to the RICS for placing no value at all on the EPC. The great unwashed are even less likely to pay more for a building constructed of “environmentally friendly” materials until we have some form of punitive levy on builders that encourages a change in behaviour

Finally, we must remind ourselves that 90% of the carbon footprint associated with the life of a T-shirt is in the washing, drying and ironing. A similar percentage of the carbon footprint associated with the life of a building comes from energy consumption in use, mainly for space heating, lighting and hot water demand. While considering embodied energy and polluting elements in building materials and components (such as PIR insulation), we must not throw the baby out with the bath water and ignore performance in use. It is significant that the Passivhaus standard takes no account of the carbon footprint of the materials and components themselves, just their performance in use

[Philip Newbold]

Absolutely spot-on Kate. It does not seem to matter how many learned people try and explain common sense to the Government on energy conservation and fuel poverty, their clueless Ministers keep turning up with more and more creative accounting initiatives like the FiT and Green Deal to hoodwink us into thinking they are doing something about climate change

The main reason that bullets are not being bitten is that, behind the scenes, furious lobbying by vested interests in the energy, construction and renewables industries ensure that nothing will be done that would harm their obscene profits. Nothing so crude as bribery and corruption is going on here (?) but just watch all these Ministers waltz into highly paid directorships with the successful lobbying companies when their parliamentary careers are over. We have not got a hope of cracking this problem as it has been going on for decades, if not centuries. This is why we have massive subsidies for renewables and 20% VAT on building fabric alterations to improve energy consumption. We really do live in a mad, mad world

[Philip Newbold]

An absolutely excellent proposal Ken and one which ought to provide something of a wake-up-call for the Government, describing, as it does in some detail, the scale of the problem facing us. The really annoying thing about the Government's unwillingness to bite the bullet on this issue is that, apart from some obvious planning issues with external insulation, the technology and materials to achieve these energy use reductions are available to us now, albeit with varying degrees of environmental acceptability by the Deep Green brigade. By contrast, adding imported renewables with a limited lifespan or, dare I say it, building a Passivhaus using imported components, does nothing to support UK industries

What the Government seems to be refusing to admit is the scale of financial input required on retrofit in order to achieve significant savings on energy use. I have often found myself chanting the mantras, “fabric first” and “insulation is cheap, renewables are expensive” but when you add in the replacement of external doors, windows, boilers, lighting and appliances, even though the whole thing is still much more cost-effective than adding Chinese PV panels or an air-source heat-pump, it is not what you might call cheap. As you rightly point out, £6000 from the Green Deal is not going to go very far and if we remain fixated on payback periods, most people of a certain age are going to take some convincing to spend their life savings to help save the planet, even if it does signifcantly reduce their energy bills

If only all the playing fields were level, how much easier this building business would be. If only democratically elected Governments were actually directly accountable for their policies, how much less of a mess would we be in?

[Philip Newbold]

Hi Debbie, I am in County Durham near Barnard Castle. Would the Yorkshire Group currently be the nearest to me? I think we could do with a North East England group really. Anyone interested?
Phil Newbold
New Bold Design

[Philip Newbold]

I used to work in a Grade II* Listed Manor House in Sedgefield built in 1707. When my former employer bought the building it already had modern suspended ceilings (installed when it was the local Council offices). We needed to make some minor internal alterations which involved covering up an original oak beam across the ceiling on the top floor. English Heritage were a bit sniffy about the alterations but when I pointed out we were spending £250k on restoration works to the fabric, not to mention the vandalism that the Council had carried out during their occupation, we were able to persuade them that, as Architects, we were doing more good than harm. They did insist, however, that any original features, such as the oak beam, that were to be covered up by modern materials had to be photographed extensively (with copies sent to EH) and the new materials could not touch or be attached to these features in any way. Hope that might be of some help

Phil Newbold, Director, new bold design

[Author]

Posts