Retrofitting Buildings: National Strategy

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point that I shall definitely take back to my other department, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—building regulations are really a matter for it.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, has my noble friend reviewed the pilot study carried out by the chief scientific adviser to the DCLG in 2019 on retrofitting a sample of social houses? It found that the average cost of doing this was £85,000 per house, but the reduction in emissions was only 60%. If scaled up nationally and if we take the heroic assumption that costs will be reduced by a factor of three, it would still cost £1 trillion. Have any of the proponents of retrofitting suggested where this money will come from?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I draw my noble friend’s attention to Selly Oak’s project to retrofit many of its poor council houses. This is under way at the moment, but it seems to be having a much better result than the examples that he has just cited.