Why we need a 'green homes' standard

In all this week’s continuing turmoil around financial markets and our own continuing annus horribilis in housing, it’s all too easy to focus on the immediate pressures of the here and now at the expense of some fundamental long term issues we desperately need to get right. Take carbon emissions. We increasingly know what we need to do and the implications of not acting. But this knowledge is yet to be translated fully into policy action.

The good news is that compared with other sectors such as aviation, the route map to do something about climate change through housing is relatively straightforward. And given that 27 per cent of carbon emissions come from our homes, the majority of which have already been built, housing is crucial in meeting the government’s target to reduce carbon emissions by a minimum of 60 per cent by 2050.

A number of recent studies, such as work by the WWF in 2008 and Boardman in 2007, have shown that carbon reductions of 80 per cent from the existing housing stock by 2050 are achievable. This could unlock massive savings that would have implications across the economy – helping not only individual consumers but also reducing the need to bring forward expensive new energy capacity. Although a nation-wide programme to deliver steep carbon cuts from our existing stock will be by no means an easy undertaking, it isn’t an altogether unfamiliar scenario.

The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) was instrumental in identifying a £19 billion backlog of repairs in the public sector housing stock and in developing the decent homes standard to address this issue. A daunting challenge at the time, but only ten years on and the decent programme has achieved a tremendous amount by upgrading hundreds of thousands of homes and giving whole communities a new lease of life.

As an added bonus it has the potential to support a construction sector which has been hit hard by the ‘credit crunch’, resulting in job losses on a large scale, by focusing on new market opportunities.

Whilst this time the challenge is just as pronounced if not more so – the Green Building Council estimates it will cost £2.6 to £13.9 billion per year to cut carbon from the existing stock by 80 per cent by 2050 – there are some valuable lessons to be learnt from the decent homes programme, not least in terms of leadership from government. And it is a clear government leadership role which CIH is calling for. We have seen some signs of this already with last week’s announcements of the government’s aim to insulate of all Britain’s homes by 2020, but it needs to go further.

It is to this end that CIH has been calling on government to set a long-term ‘green homes’ target for reducing carbon emissions from the existing stock, in line with emission reduction trajectories set by the Office of Climate Change.

This will give industry much needed certainty for investment decisions and crucially would help ensure that the supply chain can start to shift to deliver the products and technology on the scale needed. As an added bonus it has the potential to support a construction sector which has been hit hard by the ‘credit crunch’, resulting in job losses on a large scale, by focusing on new market opportunities. It will also reduce our energy consumption levels, mitigate against further energy price increases and help alleviate fuel poverty once and for all.

For all its good intentions, our current piecemeal approach does not address the scale of the problem, nor is it fit for purpose. Over the coming months, we will be taking this agenda forward by working with government and sector stakeholders. Without a clear policy focus on a wholesale transformation of UK housing, we risk abdicating responsibility to the next generation and failing to meet our overarching carbon reduction targets.