The Conservatives in the UK missed the boat on a stronger sustainability agenda by passing over Penny Mordaunt (“her with the sword”).
A fortnight ago, when I suggested the beginnings of an Australian-style Teal revolution for Britain, I also mentioned that the performance of Brighton & Hove’s minority Green City Council has been, at best, sketchy.
Since then, British politics has been… a lot.
The council’s sketchiness contaminated Brighton Pavilion local member, Caroline Lucas – the Green Party’s only MP – with polling showing her support had halved. Faced with that, last Thursday she announced she wouldn’t stand for re-election.
Then, the resignations: Boris Johnson finally read the room and departed, once he knew his PM’s resignation honours list was going ahead and his friends were looked after. Nadine Dorries realised she wasn’t a friend, so beat Boris to the headlines by resigning first. Nigel Adams waited until after lunch.
Hopefully, these departures signal the end of the Conservatives’ flirtation with populism, isolationism and embrace of privilege over performance.
In sustainability, the Conservative track record, and Johnson’s legacy, are poor. Britain increased its offshore wind generation capacity – which was arguably going to happen anyway – but still won’t allow it on land. Sales of electric vehicles are up, but probably more due to consumers than government.
The built environment was glaringly absent from any government policy during or since the Johnson era, despite Britain having the least thermally efficient buildings in Europe. Johnson did introduce the Green Homes Grant, but it closed within six months amid claims it was unworkable.
Post Johnson, the Conservatives missed the boat on these issues by passing over Penny Mordaunt for leadership in favour of Rishi Sunak. Penny Mordaunt is the member for Portsmouth North, though you probably know her better as “her with the sword” at King Charles II’s coronation.
She is committed to improving Britain’s built environment and champions planning reforms to improve the situation. She has been putting money where her mouth is in Portsmouth, supporting schemes to improve the performance of legacy buildings.
The built environment was glaringly absent from any government policy during or since the Johnson era, despite Britain having the least thermally efficient buildings in Europe
This brings us to another great example of British regulation thwarting British ambition.
Proposed rules will require British rental properties to achieve a C rating on their Energy Performance Certificate after 2025 and existing rentals by 2028. To put this into perspective, a three bedroom Georgian or Victorian terrace house in Central London with single-glazed sash windows and a combi boiler can scrape a rating of E for itself – the current efficiency requirement.
Insulating the roof and walls and double glazing the windows may lift a house’s performance to C – just scraping over the threshold of being rentable. Double glazing usually requires new windows or sashes. In a conservation area this requires council approval – at least eight weeks, while councils work through their COVID backlogs. Listed buildings need more time for listed building consent.
The actual work has a lead time of up to a year – there are specialist builders who only do sash window upgrading – and costs between £10,000 ($18,638) and £35,000 ($65,227) on a moderately sized house with seven to 10 windows.
The walls can only be insulated on the inside or outside, because of limited cavity space, and councils – and even individual planners within council – vary in their acceptance of external insulation coatings. Roof insulation is relatively easy in properties with unlined lofts, but not easy in butterfly roofs – and most councils are trying to preserve the butterfly roofs of these old houses.
Finding statistics on the architecture of London’s residential buildings is extremely difficult – most research focuses on type of title or type of dwelling type – house, semi, terrace, flat – without recognising that many flats are in converted houses, semis and terraces.
But, go up to chimneypot height you will very quickly realise that much of Inner London’s housing stock has solid brick walls and a butterfly roof.
Hundreds of thousands of these houses could be removed from the rental market by 2028 without planning reforms to make it easier to improve the performance of buildings. Penny Mordaunt knows and champions this – we have discussed it together – but I don’t know if she has been able to convince her colleagues that there is a problem.
But it’s all going to be OK because the Conservatives will lose the next election and Labour will come in and fix everything… won’t it?
Well, Labour was also busy last week, watering down its strategy of £28 billion (AU$52 billion) of green investment every year for three years to a vaguer claim of significant amounts in the first year with increases to follow, so scepticism is growing.
There is hope, though: HotSat-1 was launched last week, to fly 500 kilometres above the earth and measure the heat output each of Britain’s houses to identify the under performers.
Maybe sexy technology will help the government to take notice.