Making homes retrofit for the future

There is no doubting that climate change is one of the most serious threats facing the modern world and as housing accounts for 27 per cent of the UK’s CO2 emissions, the housing sector has a large part to play

The Climate Change Act 2008 set legally binding emission reduction targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 34 per cent for 2020 and for a reduction of at least 80 per cent by 2050. The coalition Government’s policies still need to be fine-tuned but the environment is high on the agenda with a pledge to cut carbon emissions from central Government by 10 per cent in the next 12 months.

The Code for Sustainable Homes has seen changes in the way that we build new properties but just focusing on new build is not enough and if these ambitious targets are to be met a massive programme to retrofit the UK’s housing stock will be necessary.

“There is absolutely no strategy for reducing the UK’s carbon emissions that doesn’t involve reducing energy use in our homes,” says John Alker, director of policy and communications at UK Green Building Council, whose members span the construction and property sectors from architects and engineers to product manufacturers and developers.

It campaigns on issues relating to the sustainability of homes, buildings and communities, providing information for members and getting them to share best practice, lobbying Government and working with Government and the industry on policy and technical issues.

Alker is under no illusion of the scale of the task in hand. In his words “practically every home in the country at some point over the next generation” will need to undergo some kind of retrofit programme.

He says: “You can play around with the maths, you could do five million homes a year to a lesser degree or you could do half a million homes a year to a greater degree – the point is almost no home in the country will go untouched, the majority will need some element of energy efficiency and low carbon refurbishment.”

Andrew Percival is a consultant for Kinetics Sustainable Property Solutions, part of the Kinetics Group. His role is to help the company to address the green agenda and build capacity and expertise to
respond to the increasing demand for energy efficient and renewable energy technologies which are set out in the UK’s Household Energy Management Strategy and the Low Carbon Transition Plan. “My role is to assist Kinetics to bring capacity within the business to address what we consider to be a very very big agenda and also to support clients as they grapple with some of the challenges that they are going to be facing over the next 20 years,” he says.

The social housing sector appears to be leading the way with a number of pilot projects but for Percival while it is ahead of the game in terms of basic energy efficiency measures, the agenda is moving faster than the industry.

“There are lots of trials going on but there is very little I have seen that is wholesale at the moment,” he says. “The bigger authorities seem to be the ones that have got the capital, the drive and resources to do it.

The smaller housing associations are struggling first of all to finance this massive agenda and secondly to deliver it in terms of their capability.”

Many of the schemes taking place across the country have been funded through the Technology Strategy Board’s “Retrofit for the Future” programme, which has been delivered in two phases.

Phase one saw £3.5 million awarded to 180 organisations covering 193 separate projects, enabling them to work with suppliers, devising solutions to make cuts in carbon emissions produced by social housing.

In Phase two 87 projects have been awarded contracts to build ‘demonstrator’ houses with £13.5 million funding, £7 million of which was supplied by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ Strategic Investment Fund.

East Midlands Housing Association has been awarded £144,000 for Project Cottersmore, which will involve retrofitting a Victorian terraced house in Leicester. Working with technical advisors from De Montfort University, partners Aqua Interiors and Vanguard Homes and a number of local suppliers the idea is to improve energy efficiency in the mid-terraced property using easy to replicate features without impinging on the street scene.

David Shaw, head of asset management at EMHA, says: “What they are saying is 27 per cent of all carbon emissions in the UK come from our homes and they say about 60 to 80 per cent of houses that we will be living in, in 2050 are already here. They are saying that it is no good just addressing new-build, we need to be addressing existing stock. So that is what the challenge was all about to see whether we could reduce the greenhouse emissions and energy use within this house by 80 per cent.”

Work is due to start onsite next month and the house will be fitted with heat recovery systems and interactive, intelligent and adaptive learning and heating controls which recognise when heat is needed, as well as an internal insulation solution leading to cheaper fuel bills and a better environment free from damp with improved sound insulation. But fitting these features into a pre-existing property is not without its problems and the internal insulation led to a loss of floor space, which in turn led to a redesign of the property.

Ultimately a living room was lost and as there are many families in the area with a cultural preference for two living rooms it was important to recreate that space, so the designers allocated the rear bedroom as a second living room, providing a bedroom in the roofspace.

“We are working with a company to construct a bedroom off site, which will come fully furnished and decorated and will be lifted and put into place with the mechanical heat recovery,” says Shaw. “We are trying to get a bit of offsite fabrication involved with the idea being that if you have got 20 of these to do you are speeding up onsite time because it is going to be quite disruptive to people living in these houses.”

Once the work has been carried out the idea is to initially use the property as one of several “decanting houses” for people who are being moved out of their homes during Decent Homes work.

“I want to use this property as a decant house for people who live in similar sorts of properties and see how they get on with it,” says Shaw. With Percival’s help Kinetics is training its staff in the installation and maintenance of renewables and working with clients to identify energy efficient retrofit solutions for their properties. Most recent programmes include large scale installations of air source heat pumps and solar thermal panels for care homes. The company is also embarking on large scale PV installations in light of the opportunities presented with the Feed in Tariff (FiT).

But Percival warns that such features shouldn’t be fitted without proper research. “There is a danger with all of this technology that if you don’t do your homework at the front end and that means understanding how energy is used in a building and how that energy is contained within the building in terms of heat then there is a danger that customers and clients could make a bad decision.

“That’s why Kinetics is probably the first in the country as a contractor to have its surveyors trained up to be able to produce Energy Performance Certificates and SAP ratings. With that we have a situation where we can go in and we can do an assessment of a building far more intelligently to be able to recommend to clients what applications are needed. If I was a business that just sold air source heat pumps all I would want to sell you is an air source heat pump whereas we have recognised that air source heat pumps have a good track record in some areas but you wouldn’t necessarily fit them in every context. We have got the range and dexterity to be able to select from the range of renewables and energy efficient measures to be able to deliver a whole house solution which is what the Government is talking about really.”

The social housing sector has long been a pioneer of new techniques helped by the fact that it can obtain funding and support not available to individual homeowners but the big question that remains is how can homeowners be persuaded to green retrofit their homes and how practical would such a scheme be?

“There are debates going on as to whether you do it literally house by house, street by street and then you just do one hit on each home and a whole house retrofit or whether when people are already doing work such as redecorating, re-wiring or plumbing, you take those opportunities to do some work and then you have a plan for doing the rest of the work at future points in time and there are different schools of thought as to how you do this,” says Alker.

“The reality is we are probably going to do all of the above, we are going to need to do some street by street programmes which can kind of enthuse a whole neighbourhood and we are also going to need to give people the opportunity to get this work done when it makes financial sense for them to do so and that is often at the same time as when they are doing other work.”

The Pay as You Save concept put forward earlier this year is set to be put into legislation, allowing people to access cheap finance, without upfront costs to pay for a package of measures to their homes.

Alker has suggested that it may take a “sticks and carrots” approach of financial incentives or disincentives to encourage homeowners to take part, such as scaling up or down Council Tax and stamp duty based on how energy efficient the property is.

The general consensus seems to be that things are moving in the right direction but are perhaps not moving quickly enough.

For Alker there is not enough capacity within the industry to carry out a large-scale retrofit programme at the moment.

“Right now they couldn’t just go out and refurbish two million homes a year but if the demand is there from consumers then they will quickly be able to upscale and roll this out,” he says. “There tends not to be a problem if the demand is there. The problem is it is a bit chicken and egg at the moment, the Government policy isn’t quite there, the consumer demand isn’t quite there and the industry capacity isn’t quite there and you need to address all of those. They all have to move forward at the same time really.

“It is probably going to be Government policy initially which is the key driver and I think the industry capacity is always likely to be the thing bringing up the rear because there simply isn’t the incentive for them to get that capacity unless the demand is there so it is going to require some scaling up but we are pretty confident that the industry can scale up very rapidly once the demand is there.”

Operatives are going to be required to learn a range of new skills, for example electricians are going to have to be able to deal with renewable energy installations.

Percival agrees that there is still a major skills gap and while companies such as Kinetics are investing in training many businesses are ignoring the massive training needs required to meet future demand and expertise in the retrofit market.

“There are massive green job opportunities for many many people and one of the ambitions of the Household Energy Management Strategy is to create 65,000 green jobs within the country,” he says.

However he believes that if Britain can catch up and start to lead the way with regards to green technologies and skills there is an opportunity for it to export that knowledge boosting the UK economy at the same time.

The green retrofit agenda is obviously moving forward but whether the pace is fast enough remains to be seen. It can, however, be said with certainty that no home in the UK will be left untouched if these targets are to be met those organisations that have not considered green retrofit as an option need to start doing so.