CONFERENCE ECOBUILD
Existing buildings ‘becoming more effi cient’
Moira Wallace, permanent secretary at the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), said the ineffi ciency of the existing building stock was improving at a rate faster than the ‘one a minute’ refurbishment of homes that experts say is needed to meet the carbon reduction target for 2050. ‘In the last three years this country
has insulated two million cavity walls – that’s more than 10% of the nation’s stock of cavity walls – and in the same three years nearly four million lofts have been insulated. ‘My people have been working
out the numbers and these programmes have been running at more than one a minute – in fact, 3.67.’ Jack Pringle, deputy chair of
the Construction Industry Council, called for a review of VAT charges on renovations. ‘The ball is in the government’s
court. The Green Deal is a government initiative and it needs to work properly, but there are other issues too. ‘VAT on renovations to existing
buildings is absolutely crackers. In France it’s the other way around, you pay VAT on new buildings and it’s zero rated, or about 5% rated, on innovation. The French have got it right, we’ve got it wrong.’ Construction Minister Mark Prisk
responded: ‘If we were to say, right we’ll get rid of it on refurb and get the balance back on new build, you push the price of new homes even higher, so we’ve got to strike that balance. It’s a diffi cult dilemma. We already have a problem not having enough new build out there anyway.’
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The conference audience listens to a discussion on the government’s fl agship Green Deal policy for encouraging home improvements. The panel included Paul King of the UK Green Building Council and was chaired by the BBC’s Sarah Montague
Industry collaboration ‘needs to improve’
● Insulation still needs to be made more ‘sexy’, an energy fi rm chief warns
The need for collaboration between professionals was a running theme during a conference session entitled ‘From megawatts to negawatts: taking the energy out of buildings in use’.
Ian Marchant, chief executive of utility company Scottish and Southern Energy, told delegates that collaboration throughout industry needs to be improved, as well as creating trust in organisations that are involved in energy. He said this could be achieved by collaborating across organisations and building a shared purpose around improving ‘our estate’.
Delegates at Ecobuild in London
He added that ‘we still need to make insulation sexy’ and described how the public still had a long way to go in taking notice and acting, with just two million lofts insulated across the UK last year. Keith Bugden, programme director of Better Buildings Partnerships, agreed that collaboration was key to reducing carbon and improving the sustainability of the existing building stock. He said: ‘Penalties, incentives and other drivers should be suffi cient to drive real change. But unfortunately it’s also clear to me, from my work with leading organisations, that barriers to such
12 CIBSE Journal May 2012
change are also signifi cant.’ Drivers currently include the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Effi ciency scheme, Feed-in Tariffs, the Renewable Heat Incentive, and the Green Deal. But despite these, said Bugden, there seemed to be a lack of activity within industry to improve energy effi ciency. David Fisk, president-elect of CIBSE, said that industry needed to collaborate on benchmarks to drive performance.
He described benchmarking as effective, incremental and able to be done through cost effective steps, with each one opening up opportunities for doing others. But, he added: ‘As soon as someone sets one up in Britain, someone else sets up another [different] one.’
He drew on research by the University of
Cambridge, which studied Display Energy Certifi cates for all schools, and found that new academy schools consumed slightly more electricity, which in effect offset the slightly better heating performance.
‘Because none of them were properly commissioned, they’re actually just as bad as they were before,’ added Fisk.
He concluded that industry needed to collaborate on benchmarking, because ‘we are not going to get anywhere if we have 27 benchmarks’.
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