Energy Efficiency Measures: Net Zero Buildings

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

It is an honour to speak under your chairmanship today, Mr Pritchard. I listened to the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) with the greatest of interest, not least because I come from one of the coldest parts—if not the coldest part—of the United Kingdom. There is a village called Altnaharra in Sutherland, which is a great favourite of Jeremy Paxman—he goes to catch salmon there. People also have a very good chance of seeing a golden eagle there. However, every year Altanarra is the coldest place in the United Kingdom.

I have been increasingly worried by something that all right hon. and hon. Members know about: the terrible thought of a pensioner deciding to switch off their heating because they simply cannot afford it. I want to put on the record my gratitude to Councillor Richard Gale, among other colleagues, who has helped to spearhead the issue that the right hon. Gentleman spoke about in East Sutherland and the wider highlands and islands. Although we generate an enormous amount of renewable energy from our onshore and offshore wind farms, in actual fact many of my constituents have heating bills they simply cannot afford.

In absolute fairness to the Scottish Government, I want to put on the record my thanks to them; I may sometimes take a pot shot at them, but they have put tackling fuel poverty at the top of their agenda. Credit should be given where it is due. My wife comes from one of the six counties of the UK part of Ireland—let me get my history right—and I understand that similar moves are being made at Stormont, which we should be grateful for.

In my brief contribution, I will make a couple of suggestions. I live in a particularly cold, energy inefficient house, so I know all about keeping a house warm. Hon. Members will probably be shocked to know that I know all about lighting fires and trying to stay warm and trying to haul ancient shutters shut and getting them to stay shut. Oddly enough, old-fashioned wooden shutters were quite good at energy insulation, although I am not advocating that we step back to 18th or early 19th-century building construction. The right hon. Gentleman talked about retrofitting; that is the problem we face in the highlands. Notwithstanding the good measures undertaken by the Scottish Government, in some ways we were slightly better at these things 25 years ago than we are today.

That leads me to my next point. A long time ago, when I was a councillor in the 1980s and 1990s, home improvements could be undertaken in several ways. The Scottish Office—then part of the UK Government, not today’s Scottish Government—would allocate two forms of capital funding to councils, known as block A and block B. Block A was used to build, renovate or do up houses in the public rented sector—that is where council houses were built. Block B was for renovating or repairing properties in poor condition that should be lived in. That included spaces above shops, because there was a tendency for many living spaces above shops not to be used in quite the way they had been when the shopkeeper lived there, as a certain former Prime Minister of this country did.

The system worked extremely well; my own Ross and Cromarty District Council was able to say, “Right, we’ll take a particular part of a village in the highlands, and target the whole of one street where there are privately owned cottages and people do not have proper insulation.” We would call it something like a care and repair scheme, which worked extremely well. There was a dividing line between the rented and not rented sector—block A and block B—but all that was capital; it was borrowing as opposed to revenue, so it was easier for the Scottish Government, and ultimately the Treasury, to use the public sector borrowing requirement and the Public Works Loan Board to get the cheapest money in town and direct it at the problems that had to be sorted out.

Today, we know for a fact that money has never been cheaper, so in some ways it is easier for the Treasury to borrow a large amount of money at a cheap rate and direct it straight at what it wants to achieve, be that building ships or whatever. As the right hon. Gentleman said, it should be relatively easy for the UK Government to direct a chunk of money at housing, given that it does not come off the revenue budget—in other words, they do not have to raise taxes to spend. They will have to cover the borrowing costs, yes, but they are very cheap. That is one suggestion worth thinking about, as it worked well in the past. Perhaps we will hear more detail about what the Scottish Government do from the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown)—he will know better than I do. The Scottish Government are doing their best.

My final point, because this is a brief contribution, is that I have spoken in this place about trying to encourage people, for carbon reasons, to buy and use electric cars. However, even for those with lots of power points for charging, electric cars are expensive things to buy. A lot of people are put off by the cost. I have suggested some kind of tax break for people who buy an electric car, taken off their pay-as-you-earn code. That might be a constructive way of looking at it. To encourage householders to think about making their homes highly efficient, it might be worth making it work for them to do the work, as well as there being Government assistance. That would address the point that right hon. and hon. Members made about heat pumps. Heat pumps work, but they are fiendishly expensive to put in, and the disruption is something else. But if the goal for the house owner at the end is worth it, the game is worth the candle—I think that is the right expression.

This is an enormous issue for me, because it is so dashed cold up in my part of the world. I wish it was not so. Who knows? Climate change may have us all growing grapes on the straths of Sutherland and Caithness in the years to come, but I doubt it.