Renegade Conservatory Guy

Guest post by Rob

I decided the following comment from one of my readers deserved a post of its own:

“There is a wider issue that no-one is picking up on. To get the UK’s CO2 emissions down, the onus is going to fall on the householder, not road traffic (how dare anyone interfere with our right to wheels!), not air travel (I WANT my annual holiday!), not industry (UK has to be competitive, unlimited growth, city bonuses).

99.9% of UK housing stock is already built, and to the lowest standards the building industry can get away with. Even new houses are poorly designed (poor detailing on insulation/airtightness, no microrenewables, poor design re solar gain, too many ensuites, no easily accessible central services, no peripheral cool food storage).

Faced with accelerating CO2 emissions, and genuinely scared of what climate change may bring, the government/insurance industry/media have promoted micro-renewable energy generation without realising that

1) they are of no use unless the house is thoroughly insulated, and
2) because sun, wind etc do not generate electricity/heat at convenient times, hence the power source must be linked to the grid, and the householder paid (meter driven in reverse) at a rate to make it worthwhile.

But first, to retrofit insulation, and install most micro-renewables is destructive and very expensive. To rub salt in, and this is my main point, YOU PAY 15% TAX (SOON TO BE 20%) ON YOUR BUILDERS TIME, ON THE INSULATING MATERIALS, ON EXCAVATING, PIPEWORK AND EVERYTHING REQUIRED TO GET YOUR HOUSE BACK TO NORMAL!

For most people, if your job and life are uncertain, if you may move house, then the disruption and expense are not worthwhile. The payback time of most microrenewable equipment, alone, is measured in decades.

We have to insulate below solid and suspended timber floors, take up and insulate under flat roof, relocate and replace oil boiler with biomass boiler, and apart from a grant for the boiler, we have to pay (2010 onwards) 20% tax to HMRC. on all labour and costs – where is the logic in that, and should we bother?

It’s illuminating that most MPs expenses claims were for tarty makeovers rather than, say for dry lining their entire house and installing a ground-source heat pump! Shows how much they understand the problem of retro-insulating the UK’s housing stock!

This window scrappage idea is just one small part of an impasse we are all in. What next for scrappage? In logical order of emissions/heat loss we should then have a roof scrappage scheme, then walls, doors, floors, boilers … Firstly, building materials related to energy conservation must be zero-VAT rated.”