Carbon Emissions (Buildings) Bill

Debate between Holly Mumby-Croft and Jerome Mayhew

Friday 25th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Holly Mumby-Croft (Scunthorpe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell). I wholeheartedly agree with his points about offshoring; he is absolutely spot on as always. My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) has made three cracking speeches today and scored a hattrick of his own.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew) for bringing forward the Bill; he knows that he has my full support, although I gently point out that we in Scunthorpe are not overly worried about the precedents set in Europe. It is right that we have a discussion about the wider impact of buildings on our carbon output, beyond their day-to-day energy consumption.

As the long title of the Bill highlights, a building does not just emit carbon when it is operational, but from the moment an architect is asked to design it to the day it is demolished. The Bill sets out two ways to advance our national mission to reduce emissions, and I want to ask some questions about the proposals in the hope that it will be helpful to my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland.

First, the Bill mandates the reporting of the whole-life carbon emissions of a building. Whole-life carbon assessments help us to put a numerical value on the impact of a development. It is also a statistic on which developers can compete with each other, hopefully driving down emissions across the sector. However, I am keen to understand how that requirement will fit in with existing criteria for buildings—something that hon. Members have raised this afternoon.

The national planning policy framework already sets out that new developments should help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through their location, orientation and design, in line with the emissions obligations in the Climate Change Act 2008. Using those guidelines, local planning authorities then put forward a local plan, against which planning applications must be considered. Indeed, my excellent local council—probably the best council, in fact—North Lincolnshire Council, released its local plan this month, and it contained standards that encourage developers to reduce whole-life carbon emissions. The plan states that all developments should maximise the reuse or recycling of materials in new construction, and make the best possible use of existing building infrastructure. According to the plan, that should be done by minimising the use of non-renewable and unsustainable finite resources, during both construction and use. Hypothetically, if every council was as good as mine, and every planning proposal in the country was tested against standards like those, developers would already need to show that they are minimising carbon emissions through their building materials.

Mandatory reporting should only be introduced if there is a strong case for saying that local planning authorities do not put enough weight on whole-life emissions when considering applications. In short, it is important that we justify our introducing the Bill.

[Jerome Mayhew]

There are many ways to skin a cat; that is the nub of my hon. Friend’s speech. However, the logical time for a detailed assessment of the whole-life carbon of a building and its construction materials is when those materials have been finalised. That is not typically at the planning stage. Yes, there will be an outline of the building, but the detailed decisions on what materials will be used are not yet made. As a result, and as happens in the Greater London Authority—its planning policy takes a similar approach—guesstimates are made of the whole-life carbon impact. Later, when building control is involved, we can get accurate calculations.

[Holly Mumby-Croft]

My hon. Friend makes a really good point, but I think he would agree with me that the ethos behind what councils such as mine are doing is exactly in line with what he aims to achieve through the Bill. To reiterate, it is important that we justify clearly why this Bill is needed, because it will cost time and money, and it is an extra hoop that we will be asking businesses and individuals to jump through.

The Bill also rightly acknowledges that the Secretary of State would need to approve a national methodology for whole-life carbon assessments. Right now, public works projects and programmes are required to have a whole-life assessment as part of the tendering requirement, but contracting authorities are encouraged to create their own specific guidelines on how that is presented, or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland mentioned, to use the guidelines released by the Greater London Authority.

If we are to ultimately pass that requirement on to private developments, the top-down direction on the appropriate methodology needs to be addressed. We need to ensure that we do a decent job of that. The industry is generally familiar with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors whole-life carbon assessment, but the availability of other guidance risks creating inconsistency.

I know that the Government have plans to hold a consultation in 2023 on how best to mainstream the measurement of embodied carbon, and I would be keen to know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland has explored the options available. He is an expert on this subject and could make a really valuable input to that. As he said, other countries in Europe have begun legislating for whole-life carbon assessments, and I hope that those will prove an inspiration, and will help us not to fall into any pitfalls that other countries have fallen into.

The Bill may lead to limits on embodied carbon, including carbon emitted in the acquisition, assembly, maintenance and end-of-life disposal of building materials. I know the Government are considering that, as stated in their response to the Environmental Audit Committee’s report on costing carbon in construction. If we created embodied carbon limits, we would have to consider a number of factors. First, the limits would need to be relative to not just the purpose of the building, which is obvious, but the size of the development.

However, if larger developments can reduce emissions through economies of scale but smaller ones cannot do that as easily, there may be perverse outcomes for the property market. This legislation would also favour larger developers who have the capacity to better absorb emissions reduction costs. It is important to be wary of how this could affect small and medium-sized enterprises in the industry, given that we aim to increase our housing supply.

I am curious about how the Bill would address the impact of location choice on emissions. For example, should a residential or commercial property receive relief from the embodied carbon limits if the choice is made to locate it on a public transport network—for example, near to a railway or bus station? Large employers may prevent hundreds of car journeys a day if they set up shop on an easily accessible site. To take that a step further, could we find ourselves using plans for a railway station, bus route or metro in our constituency as a lever during the planning process and the calculation of those emissions?

My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland will not be surprised to hear that I also have questions regarding the steel industry. Members understand that steel is a carbon-intensive product to make. The future of the steel industry will inevitably at some point be around decarbonisation, finding greener ways to make steel and mitigating the impact of production, but while that process takes place, the adoption of embodied carbon limits on development may affect demand for steel if they do not appropriately recognise steel’s value of recyclability.

Steel is one of our most sustainable materials due to its immense durability and the capacity to reuse it—it is almost endlessly recyclable and can be repurposed. Any definition of embodied carbon has to appropriately weight that value against the carbon emitted during the production, and has to consider the lifespan and quality of the materials that we are able to produce in this country. As my hon. Friend will know, we make the finest steel in the world.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way a second time. On the question of steel, she is absolutely right. If enacted, the Bill would be a great opportunity for British steel. As she will know, about 50% of all steel used for construction in this country is imported. Given the additional carbon emissions that result from the transportation of a very heavy and bulky product, British Steel and steel producers in her constituency—

[Jerome Mayhew]

British Steel and other steel producers, including the one in my hon. Friend’s constituency, already have plans in place to reduce the carbon intensity of their products before 2035 and 2055 by as much as 80% by reusing scrap metal instead of exporting it abroad for reuse. Does she agree that the Bill gives impetus to this developing new sector in the steel industry, rather than restraining it?

[Holly Mumby-Croft]

I agree that we need to be extremely careful about the transportation of materials—my hon. Friend is absolutely right—but therein lies a challenge. To work through the restrictions in the Bill, we would need a level of confidence when we imported materials, be they steel or anything else. We would need confidence about how much carbon has gone into the steel; trust in the people who made it; and to know how far it has come, where the fuel for the ship has come from and how the steel in the ship was built. He is right that there are opportunities for steel, but if he is seeking to persuade me solely on the terms that he mentioned, he has not quite managed to do so.

That brings me to my next point: we need to discuss whether we have that level of assurance. Inevitably, many of the products that go into the buildings of the future will come from abroad, and we need to understand that. As always, companies in this country will play by the rules, but my hon. Friend knows that that is not always the case across the world.

Concrete is another sector that could face problems, if sustainability advantages are not weighted properly. I have a fantastic firm in my constituency, Techrete, which I am very proud of. It has contributed to a number of buildings across the country and the world. There have been 600 projects in the past 37 years, and I will draw your attention to a small number that you may have seen, Mr Deputy Speaker, because they are all quite close to where we are. The projects include King’s Cross station, the Olympic village and The Broadway on Victoria Street—if you walk out of here and look to your right, Mr Deputy Speaker, before you get to M&S, you will see that building. They also include Victoria Square, the Heathrow Express tunnel—we probably made the steel for the rails in that tunnel as well, and if we did, it will be the finest steel in the world—Wembley Park and University College London Hospital. On the South Bank, on the other side of the river, there are some buildings that we made, and there is also the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, Westfield shopping centre, the Imperial War Museum, St Bartholomew's Hospital, the V&A and the lettering at Arsenal.