Eco Policy Revision Needed as CSH & Green Deal Stutter

Build It expert Mike Hardwick
by Mike Hardwick
18th November 2014

It looks like the end for the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) after a short and semi-illustrious career.

Set up in December 2006 by the government in conjunction with the Building Research Establishment, its aim was to find a way of improving the quality and efficiency of new UK homes. Never mandated by law in England, CSH was an optional requirement embraced only by those building sustainably.

It focused on energy efficiency rather than the wider issues of waste, ecology and wellbeing. Over a period of time, these energy requirements have gradually been subsumed into the improved Building Regulations, so the CSH’s principal raison d’être has effectively gone.

Once energy efficiency is taken out, you are left with a box-ticking exercise for a lot of fairly common sense items, such as bin stores and clothes driers, that the average self-builder would consider a standard part of the process anyway.

Green Deal struggles

For the renovators out there, I suspect the Green Deal is going the same way, too.

Far from heralding a revolution in the upgrade of existing housing stock at its launch in 2013, as I write the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee are branding it a “disappointing failure” with a mere 4,000 assessments carried out.

The theoretical savings were never guaranteed – in spite of the so-called ‘golden rule’ – and the interest rate on improvement loans is high. It was poorly planned and executed so I won’t be sad to see it go.

Hopefully, something much more useful, such as council tax rebates for upgrading the property’s efficiency or home improvement grants, will replace it.

Moving forward

One thing I do hope comes out of this is some sort of rationalisation of sustainability policy. I’m not sure what the government actually thinks “sustainable” means at the moment, despite the “presumption in favour of sustainable development” of the National Planning Policy Framework.

I heard of one instance recently where the planners insisted that, on a particular site, the heating system could not be oil fired. I would suggest that this is outside their remit, especially if the preferred solution was the most suitable and cost-effective option for the owner. Planners like green additions, but they aren’t the ones paying for their installation.

I’d like to see the sustainability agenda pushed into Building Regs where there’s already an element of discretion involved and some sort of engagement with the inspectors. Sites will always have specific issues and a one-size-fits-all approach never gets the best results.

Do spare a thought for the CSH assessors out there, who will face yet more retraining. How many of them guys initially trained to be Home Information Pack advisors before these were scrapped?

2 Comments

  1. Retired Dave says:

    Mike, Without being sycophantic you are one of the few people in any of the self-build mags (I subscribe to three) that talks any sense.

    CSH was just another bureaucratic layer with a sound-bite name. Seeing someone struggle with attaining a code level on an episode of Grand Designs (it was part of the planning requirements) but managing it in the end by making sure they had a rotary drier and a few wild flowers in the garden just demonstrated the box-ticking nature of the exercise.

    The required level of environmental performance should be part of the building regs as you so rightly say. The government’s approach (if it can be said to be that organised) speaks volumes about the lack of reality amongst those that govern us and the poor level of “expert” advice they get.

    Nobody thinks that resources are infinite and that energy efficiency is not important but sticking plaster ideas that don’t help anyway are the norm.

    FITs reward people who can afford PV panels with a subsidy provided by increasing everyone else’s electricity bill. Wind is even worse. Without subsidy they make little sense and few would do it. The RHI (does the “I” stand for insanity) gives bigger rewards the more energy you need to heat your home (within a basic level of efficiency). The strategy of supporting and subsidising heat pumps does little to reduce CO2 emissions, it is just aimed at switching people from gas to electricity so they can claim that some of that electricity is “renewable” (all to do with EU laws). Build a Passive House which uses no central heating and very little electricity and you get nothing.

    If the government were serious about sustainability and we all should be whether CO2 is evil or not, then they should mandate in building regs to get as low an energy demand as possible and reward those who use as little energy as they can, not support expensive add-ons that require considerable amounts of electricity.

  2. Mike Hardwick says:

    Thank you for your comments, Dave. I think we both agree on the major points here. I especially empathise with your point about there being no incentives for building airtight and well-insulated homes under the basic principle of ‘fabric first’. Someone explained it to me brilliantly the other day: If you consider the analogy of a house being like a bucket full of holes and heat as water, we have come up with, and heavily subsidise, better and more complex ways of filling the bucket when it would be easier and cheaper just to fix the holes!

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