Affordable Housing

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I will focus my comments on housing which is not just affordable to buy or rent but to live in. It is very tempting to think only of the capital cost of building new houses without considering the whole life cost of heating and maintaining it. By definition, people who need affordable housing are on low incomes and cannot afford the inevitable rising cost of energy. That is one reason for building and adapting houses that need little or no energy for space and water heating. The other reason is, of course, global warming and the need to hit our 2050 climate target well before 2050. Indeed, we should be aiming for energy positive, not just energy neutral, homes.

Energy used in homes accounts for about 20% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, and three-quarters of that comes from heating and hot water. Eighty percent of the homes people will inhabit in 2050 have already been built, meaning that it is not possible to rely on new builds alone to meet legal energy-saving targets set in the Climate Change Act 2008.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology has published a new report that highlights how the UK cannot build its way to a low-carbon future without retrofitting old, cold homes to meet 2050 climate targets. Deep retrofitting is a whole-house approach to upgrading energy efficiency in one step, as opposed to a series of incremental improvements. This includes: adding solar panels and local microgeneration, insulation and ventilation, and sustainable heating systems. It has identified the barriers to the development of a national programme of deep retrofit. They include: lack of customer demand; no effective policy driver for change, high costs per home, as there is not yet a supply chain that can deliver deep retrofits cost effectively, in volume, and at speed; and a lack of initial financing.

The report calls for both national and local government to take the lead in encouraging and supporting the necessary changes, which include: consistent policy objectives and a national programme for deep retrofit and climate resilience, with an initial focus on social housing; reducing costs and building supply-chain capacity by developing pilot programmes; engaging with home owners to discuss the benefits of deep retrofit; and creating larger projects that are attractive to investors, by aggregating smaller projects into bigger blocks and introducing more flexible ways for local authorities to borrow and invest in such programmes.

Affordable housing should be regarded as essential infrastructure: good-quality shelter is as important as food, mobility, healthcare and community. We simply cannot compete in a global sense if our housing infrastructure is inadequate and poor quality, but at present we fail on both counts.

I will finish with three other, often disregarded issues. The first is progressive, integrated design and delivery models. A House of Lords report recently dealt with offsite and modern methods of construction. We have a tremendous opportunity in the UK to embrace a genuine culture shift away from construction as we know it, towards progressive, integrated methods, employing design for manufacture and delivery. This could be a game-changer, and move us from what is now an unattractive, backward-gazing sector, to one which attracts the brightest and the best, and moves forward in an exciting way.

The second is making the most of the UK’s renewable resources, particularly timber. We have untapped potential, with the development of UK-derived innovative timber products, which could safely replace plastics, steel and concrete, which are often imported. Not enough focus is being put into supporting R&D in this area.

The third issue is the large, interconnected network of low-carbon and circular-economy industries, such as domestic-scale, micro-renewable technologies, which could emerge across urban and rural UK regions. This is particularly relevant to Wales, highland and south-west Scotland, but many other regions could contribute. I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on these three opportunities.