On Eco Slab

This is me at the Harrogate Homebuilding & Renovating show standing on an Eco Slab.

What is an Eco Slab? Well, I hadn’t seen one before but the fact that it was being demonstrated on the stand of Logix, one of our best known ICF suppliers, gives you a clue. Because what ICFs are to walls (i.e polystyrene moulds), Eco Slabs are to floors.

• You level the hardcore base
• You cover the floor with 1m square eco slabs, which have little polystrene legs
• You then pour a re-inforced concrete slab. The thicker the concrete, the wider the achievable span.

Will it catch on? I’m not sure. What you end up with is a hybrid which is not quite a solid slab (because there is air beneath the eco slab) and yet not quite a suspended floor (because the legs of the eco slabs rest on the ground). Does it require ventilation, as a suspended floor would? Not sure. And if not, then why not just build a solid slab? Off to the website to find out more but the website just shows up as a blank page in all my browsers, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the company behind it.

But it certainly supports a 15 stone blogger, and his Costa Coffee latte.

Windfarms: a small proposal

Interesting conversation last night with Anna Stanford, head of communications at RES, who I met at the Inbuilt birthday party last night. RES are behind the Wadlow windfarm development, which is local to me and which had been stalled in interminable planning negotiations.

I asked her why RES didn’t offer some sort of financial inducement to the locals in order to get them onside. She said it was not possible because it would be regarded as bribery: the planning system expressly forbids it — or at least I think that was the gist of what she was saying. Technically, it would be feasible, for a 13 unit windfarm, such as the Wadlow one, would produce far more power than the surrounding parishes would ever need, and the financial model would still stack up because wind energy, albeit in its subsidised form, is very profitable and it would still be profitable if, say, 10% of the profit, or the power drawn from one of the turbines, was used to pay the electricity bills of homes within a mile or so.

There are various models you could work on to make it fair: for instance if you were within 1000m, you would get all your electricity paid for up to a certain amount, and if you were within 2000m you would get 50%. And so on. That way the community wouldn’t just have a windfarm dumped on them, which is what the system demands at present, but rather it could sell its wind energy potential on the open market.

The reason this can’t be done essentially boils down to a problem with definitions of ownership. No one can own wind energy — it’s a common good. But surely if organisations like RES are able to obtain rights to harvest some of this energy, they should pay compensation to anyone that they might inconvenience along the way.

All things being equal, most parishes would probably rather not pay host to a windfarm built on an industrial scale, so why shouldn’t the ones that do receive some benefit?

Meanwhile, here is an image of part of a wind farm I came across in Lanjaron in Spain two weeks ago. It’s located on the edge of the Sierra Nevada, easily visible on the road between Granada and the Med. Anyone who says a windfarm is an eyesore ought to go view this one: it is simply stunning. The road into Lanjaron weaves its way around numerous hairpins and it zigzags around several of the giant turbines. At one point you appear to be travelling through the blades themselves: they seem unbelievably close and powerful. For a brief moment, you can almost dream that the future may be benign afterall.

Ten Worst Home Improvements

I keep coming across this table on the Times website and then it keeps disappearing from view. Today I spotted it again on its Money Central site, so I thought I’d grab it and blog it, so that at least I can find it again when I next want to refer to it.


It’s both very funny and very depressing — maybe a sign of the times. It suggests that there is no point bothering doing anything ever, as all it does is waste money. Just clean everything and keep the surfaces painted.

Can things really be that bad? Where do these figures come from? It seems the research was carried out by the Abbey and it was widely quoted during the summer by a variety of media — try keying abbey research home improvements into your search engine — but I can find nothing on any Abbey site. If anybody can point me at the original document, I’d appreciate it.

Tackling the "Existing Stock"

More random thoughts on the Credit Crunch. This morning’s news that the government is buying huge stakes in RBS and HBOS seems like a very sensible idea, given the general air of panic that seems to have engulfed our financial system. Effectively, it says, these businesses cannot go bust and that money invested in them is gilt-edged.

It also changes the way the market will be seen to work for the foreseeable future. If the government can take stakes in banks, why not lots of other ventures? And why not people’s homes?

Suddenly a new vista opens up. Having spent much of the summer worrying about how to green the existing stock, and not really getting very far with my thoughts, now a new possibility rears its head.

Try this.

The government demands that every home must reduce its carbon emissions to a set level, to align itself with the requirement for a national reduction of 60% or whatever the goal is. An assessment of each house will be made (rather more thorough than our current EPCs), and a plan of remedial action drawn up. The homeowner is then free to carry out the works at their own cost, but if they cannot or will not pay, then the government will undertake the work anyway and, in exchange, take an equity stake in the house equivalent to the value of the work done. Various tax incentives will be made available to those who undertake the work quickly (such as lower council tax banding, stamp duty rebates, soft mortgage deals): or put another way, there will be penalties for those who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table. It would be a lengthy programme lasting maybe 25 years, which would mean doing a million homes a year. The building trade would be very busy. In fact, such is the level of work involved, that it could even be cast as a depression-busting New Deal.

A month ago, this would have been politically unthinkable. The bank bail-out has changed that. Now shared ownership with the government can become an engine of transformation. Afterall, no one can say it’s too expensive.

Zed Shed?

Whilst undertaking a speaking gig at the Grand Designs show on Friday, I stumbled across this, the latest innovation from the Zed Factory team, named in honour of their helmsman Bill Dunster. Or maybe not.

How to stop the Property Crash (Part 1)

Big pictures are made up of lots of little observations. That’s pretty much what’s happening with the credit crunch at the moment. No one really seems to have a complete understanding of why the markets are so gripped with panic, but gripped with panic they are. We are not about to go to war, there isn’t an asteroid about to impact, we aren’t all dying of plague, and Spurs have started the season with their customary flourish and lie bottom of the table. In fact, in many ways, it’s quite a normal autumn. So why are banks in Europe and America going down like ninepins? And why has the housing market come to a complete standstill?

Here’s my fourpence worth. We have a big problem with land values. We’ve enjoyed (or some of us have) a 50 year bull market in building land which has caused a huge disparity between the value of ordinary land (i.e. designated as agricultural) and building land. Like, building land being around 250 times more expensive than fields. This is all because of planning restrictions, or what the Americans would call zoning. The value of building land has inflated slowly and steadily during this period, accelerating in the past fifteen years only.

The point about this bubble is that it’s been so slow to inflate that people haven’t recognised it as a bubble. On the contrary, it’s been seen as being “as safe as houses”. And people have got very wealthy by buying building land (and the houses that sit on it) and just sitting there and watching the bubble inflate. And banks have lent bucket loads of money, secured against these inflated house prices. The more the land goes up in value, the more mortgages get repaid, the more money the banks had to lend to the next generation wanting to ride this gravy train.

And the government in this country has stoked the fire by claiming that there is a housing shortage and that we have to build millions more houses in order to make them more affordable. There isn’t a housing shortage, any more than there is a road shortage, but if people say it loud enough and often enough, everyone gets drawn into the illusion.

Everything has conspired to make this particular bubble seem very real and very permanent.

And yet, and yet. Eventually something has to give. Eventually people started saying “enough is enough, I have better things to do with my life than pay 50% of everything I earn to service a mortgage for a crap house.” The worm started turning about four years ago. Just a few people, a trickle no more. It greatly affected the quieter districts of the country — it took me a year to sell a house in Norfolk back then. But then it spread. More and more people stopped believing in the inexorable rise of house prices and sometime last summer it tipped the balance and prices started falling across the board.

The image that keeps coming to mind is the tide. All these deals which made sense when the tide was coming in no longer make sense now the tide is going out. They are left exposed on the beach, the loans that supported them looking naked and ashamed. That is why it’s the banks that are copping it, because a huge chunk of banking over the past 50 years has been based on property values. At the moment, it’s the banks that took on the riskier loans which look exposed, but if the tide keeps going out and prices keep falling, then the so-called safe loans, made at 70% of value, start to become exposed too. As long as property prices keep falling, then more and more bank loans will loose their security. This is why the banking system is now in crisis. The more conservative banks are best placed to ride through the storm, but ultimately all banks could be at risk if the storm doesn’t pass.

So what we really need to bring back stability to the system is for house prices to stop falling. It doesn’t matter so much whether they fall by 15%, 30% or 43%, just so long as they stop falling.

We can already see a pattern emerging. The governments around the world are moving in to bail out the distressed loans. As a result, they may well end up owning lots of houses that these loans have defaulted on. Private houses will become council houses, and mortgage defaulters may find themselves council house tenants. Afterall, it makes no sense to throw all these people out of their homes: you’d end up with a million homeless families and a million empty homes, so they might just as well stay put.

There is a better solution to this crisis than buying up distressed debt. Instead of bailing out the banks that made these loans, the government could instead bail out the people who took on the loans and can no longer afford to service them. In effect, the government could and should become house buyers of last resort, so that if someone wants to sell a house and they can’t find any buyers, the government would have to take it off their hands at a reasonable price and then make it part of their council housing stock. The price paid for the house would have to reflect the rent achievable so that the government borrowing would be supportable. And the purchase could include a right-to-buy scheme so that in future the tenants could once again become property owners, should they wish.

In effect, government intervention could set a floor on how far house prices will fall. Once we have a floor, then stability can return to the markets, the banking system will pick up again, builders will be able to dust off their toolbags and financial meltdown will be avoided. We’ll still have a nasty recession because the housing bubble is over for a long time to come, and there are all manner of businesses (the banks being a prime example) that have built their business models on ever increasing land values.

But if we can at least stabilise house prices (and the government has the power to do this), then we can start to repair the damage that’s already been done. But it’s not going to happen until the government comes out of its state of denial about the nature of the housing crisis, and its fruitcake aim of building 3 million new homes by 2020. That is the sort of thinking that has caused this problem in the first place.