Domestic Premises (Energy Performance) Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Friday 7th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I also rise to say a couple of words in the gap. I declare an interest: we farm some land and also rent out several old cottages. The Bill makes a lot of sense, especially for new housing, but I would like to make an appeal for some of these charming country cottages. We have discovered that we can do the basics easily—loft insulation, better heating insulation, et cetera—and get them to an F rating that way. To get them further up, I have found that you have to get them on to mains gas, which is much more expensive and more difficult. It depends on whether there is any nearby—and then we hear that this may be banned by 2025, I believe, so what good is that? We have been doing it anyway.

You can draft-proof, but you have to be careful, because you must maintain ventilation. It is very easy, if you hermetically seal these old buildings, to start getting that nasty black mould. It builds up and then people say, “Oh, gosh, we have terrible damp.” Actually, all they have done is keep the windows closed. There is a real problem, because then you get into the health issues. How you get over that in an old building, I am not very sure. Many people who live in older houses accept this: you have windows open occasionally and you wear a jersey in winter; your house is heated to 17 or 18 degrees, not 20 degrees—you do not pretend you are in the south of Spain. I, as a Scot, am certainly one of those people: it does save quite a lot of money. Equally, there are limits to all these things.

What I wanted to say is that if you do not allow exceptions, you are going to lose a lot of lovely cottages in lovely settings and that would be a great shame. It will not improve the housing stock for rental, either.