Where the action is

Matt Ross on the scope for a patchwork of refurb programmes to join up around the sustainability theme.

Britain’s frenetic, 15-year property boom may be fading now, but it’s leaving quite a legacy. Fuelled by spiralling prices, our towns and cities have sprouted gleaming new apartments, iconic buildings and fashionable urban quarters. And our existing housing stock has also seen dramatic change. TV programmes such as Changing Rooms and Property Ladder have turned us on to the scope for high-profile (and high- value) housing makeovers; home improvers have extended, upgraded and refurbished for both pleasure and profit; and an assortment of government-funded programmes have supported efforts to raise standards in the homes of council tenants and poorer owner-occupiers.
 
Since 2001, the government’s £40 billion Decent Homes (DH) programme has refurbished nearly a million social properties, while much of the £1.2 billion handed to nine ‘housing market renewal pathfinders’ to tackle housing blackspots has been spent refurbishing the homes of poor owner-occupiers. Meanwhile, councils have been tasked with cutting residential energy consumption by 30% between 1996 and 2011, while the government’s Warm Front, Warm Zone and Energy Efficiency Commitment schemes have channelled billions into insulating vulnerable people’s homes.
 
Unfortunately, however, we don’t have the happiest history of concerted action on refurbishing, insulating and improving the sustainability of our built environment. There’s a long legacy of activity divided by separate funding streams and management structures, with the various actors tasked with hitting different targets by uncoordinated government departments, and local programmes left to operate in less- than-glorious isolation. “We’re not joining up,” says Alan Slater, head of housing services at Stoke-on-Trent City Council. “We’ve got the national Warm Front scheme here, plus our own Warm Zone and the DH programme. But they’re never brought to bear in an integrated way on an estate level or on individual properties.”

Indeed, there are precious few examples of councils actively promoting sustainability through refurbishment – though they do exist. In the rural northeast, Wear Valley District Council’s environment officer Ian Bloomfield match- funds the government’s Low Carbon Buildings Programme with council cash to subsidise solar thermal and wind turbine installations for isolated private households. “People don’t take the risk unless the incentive is there, but we’re willing to heavily subsidise them, and with those incentives people come on board,” he says. By working with industry body National Energy Action, Bloomfield attracts further funding from utility companies keen to trial new technologies.
 
“All we have to do is find the properties,” he says. “We want to be the lead authority in trialling these products.”

Most councils, however, lack the cash and capacity to champion renewables so actively. “I am obliged to meet DH standards by 2010, and if I fail on that but do some really innovative work then I won’t be thanked for it,” says Slater. He’s also concerned that the government is cutting refurbishment budgets to boost funding for new affordable housing. His worry, he says, is “that I won’t have the financial flexibility to deal with poor housing and carbon footprint issues in the private sector”.

In Sheffield, the city council’s sustainable housing and affordable warmth manager, Robert Almond, is encountering similar problems. All the city’s sheltered housing schemes are set to be refurbished, and he’d like to install ground source heat pumps – but he may miss his chance. “The difficulty is whether we can find the extra cost within the DH programme, because it’s an opportunity rather than an encouragement on these issues,” he says. “We have the policy – but when the crunch comes, we’ve got to find the money.”

“Refurbishment is the Cinderella of the housing industry”

Council officers tend to talk wistfully of the freedoms enjoyed by those nine ‘housing market renewal pathfinders’ – Transform South Yorkshire in Sheffield, for instance, or Renew North Staffordshire in Stoke. But so far the mission for these pathfinders has been to tackle failing housing markets, not sustainability. Only now are some of them beginning sustainable refurbishment demonstration projects, joining up with the Building Research Establishment to carry out much-needed research. “There’s no proper reference model, no collated information. We’re going to put best practice scenarios together, to tell people what to do in different situations,” says project manager Kate Symons. “Refurbishment is the Cinderella of the housing industry,” adds press officer Ursula Garner. “We want to show how important a role it can play in reducing CO2 emissions.”

Rob Marston, programme manager at Transform South Yorkshire, says that the pilots will test refurbishment techniques and offer training opportunities. And Hardial Bhogal, chief executive of Renew North Staffordshire, goes a step further: after the pilot, he says, he expects to fund sustainability work within his mainstream refurbishment programme. “The legacy that we leave will change people’s expectations in terms of sustainable living,” he says.

Such training projects are important in fostering the skills for sustainable refurbishment. In the Wear Valley, the council has found partners to train local engineers. “As we’ve raised awareness, mechanical and electrical engineers have come out of the woodwork,” says Bloomfield. “Now we can draw on five or six specialist companies.” Equally rapid skills development is required among planners, he adds: “We’re training planners so they fully understand the new technologies, and that’s helped with planning consents.”

Refurbishment and sustainability experts agree that, while some renewables equipment is in short supply, we can quickly develop the workforce to carry out sustainability-oriented refurbishments. Before private householders rush to use their services, though, we’ll need further changes in attitude. “People need to understand that it isn’t about building windmills around the coast; that they can do something,” says Mitesh Dhanak, associate director for group strategic development at the Eaga Partnership, which runs government insulation schemes. “Cavity wall insulation isn’t expensive, but people don’t recognise its value.”
 
In Stoke, Alan Slater sees brighter times ahead: “After the DH programme ends in 2010, we’ll have the flexibility to think where we take our investments,” he says; Slater hopes to exploit the relationships he’s built with power companies to follow in the Wear Valley’s footsteps. Meanwhile, the pathfinders will have completed their pilot refurbishments – and some, at least, look set to subsidise sustainability work. Add to that spiralling energy prices, a maturing renewables industry and a solidifying political consensus on climate change issues, and progress looks set to accelerate. The 2008–2011 scheme for energy suppliers to fund home efficiency measures, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target [see box for more], is much bigger than its predecessors, putting an extra £1.5 billion into play, while Warm Front has been allocated £800 million.

“‘Balance trading’ could allow developers who miss zero-carbon new-build standards to offset emissions by improving the sustainability of existing nearby homes”

And if we end up struggling to meet the government’s sustainable new-build ambitions (which require all new homes to be zero-carbon by 2016), this itself could even provide a paradoxical boost for refurbishment instead. Mike Gibson, emeritus professor of planning at London South Bank University and an associate director of JVM Consultants, is researching ‘balance trading’: the idea that developers who miss zero-carbon standards could offset emissions by improving the sustainability of existing nearby homes. If economic problems slow progress towards zero-carbon homes, he suggests, “the government could take on board the idea of balance trading, and meet its carbon emission reduction targets even without reaching the 2016 zero-carbon target.” That would be very late for the Cinderella of refurbishment to arrive at the low-carbon ball. But we already know that the shoe fits: it’s just a matter of trying it on.

Grey towers go green
Matt Ross is the features editor of ‘Regeneration & Renewal’.

26 June 2008

Matt Ross

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