There is a an unspoken problem at the centre of our housing debate. Are we short of new homes? Almost every commentator states that we are and that we therefore have a housing crisis on our hands. But the evidence for it is thin on the ground and what there is is almost always constructed from data which is only partially relevant.
Like the length of council house waiting lists, which is long and growing longer, but this only tells us the demand for council/social housing. Which, in turn, tells us that either private housing is too expensive or social housing is too cheap, but it doesn't really inform us as to whether there is a shortage of housing overall.
Or rents. Rents are going up in the South-East, having been pretty stable for many years. The reason seems to be that the population is increasing, private housing is too expensive to buy, mortgage finance is difficult to come by and so private renting is the only option for many. The squeeze is on, for sure, but this still doesn't lead to the conclusion that we are short of houses.
For to be short of houses, we have to have some notion of how many houses there should be. We don't. The nearest we come to it is something called the rate of household formation, popularly believed to be around 250,000/annum in the UK as a whole. This is used as a yardstick against which to measure our pitiful attempts to match it.
In the 20 years I have been writing about housing, we have never got close to this target. It's only ever been an aspiration. In the Blair boom years, we achieved about 180,000 new homes a year: now it's down to around 100,000. In the past five years, we have fallen short of this notional target by an accumulative 750,000 homes, so you'd think house prices would have rocketed as a result. Which, of course, they haven't.
Which perhaps in turn tells us that the notion of a rate of household formation is bunkum. Households form when they can afford to. When times are tough, they hang together. A household formation rate is a nebulous idea which may well be derived from historical data but it tells us nothing about the situation as it now stands.
To have a housing shortage, you have to have something more concrete to measure it against. Like what? Well, some sort of housing standard such as number of bedrooms per head of population. Or national housing floor area, or some such Domesday Book type data (which the national census doesn't seem to collect). If we had such data to hand, we could then set a standard — such as there must be 1.5 bedrooms for every man, woman and child living in the UK — and then we could judge whether or not we have a shortfall.
Without such an approach, there is really no way of knowing whether we have too many or too few homes, anymore than we might know whether there is a road shortage or a supermarket shortage. Relative to what?
The only hard data we actually have are house prices which are very efficient at allocating resources, so that supply and demand are kept in balance. For every buyer who thinks prices are too high, there is a seller who think they are too low. Do the sellers thus conclude there is a housing surplus? No. So why do buyers insist there is a shortage? Because they'd like to see lower house prices, naturally.
But the sellers — largely the elderly half of the population — want house prices to stay high to pay for their retirement. They certainly don't want them to crash. And, surprise, surprise, it's the oldsters who are mostly dead set against new building in their area. They are the classic NIMBYs. They are not stupid.
So in a nutshell, the young would like there to be more homes so that the prices might inch down a little, whilst the sellers are perfectly happy with what we've got, thank you. That's the essential tension between the young and the old which creates our housing market. It doesn't however follow from that that we have a housing shortage.
24 Oct 2012
22 Oct 2012
What David Cameron should have said
Imagine going to fill up the family car at the garage and being confronted with a menu.
"Buy your first 10 litres for £2.00 and you can fill up the rest of the tank at just £1.15 per litre." Hmm, that sounds good. Or does it? Whilst you are trying to figure out if this is a good deal or not, you eyes alight on another option.
"Get your car serviced here and you can get 30p per litre off your petrol for six months." Excellent, you think. Except you now start wondering if its 30p off the first 10 litre price or the lower, follow-up price. Maybe it doesn't matter. Then there's another option.
"Pay by direct debit and we'll knock 5% off your annual bill." Gosh, this does sound good. A reward for loyalty. The more I spend, the more I save. You start to feel that you could spend your whole life cruising the motorways for free.
So you stand there on the forecourt not really knowing whether you are coming or going. You just wanted to fill up with petrol and you've ended up taking an IQ test and now you have a horrible feeling you've just failed.
I suspect you may know where this is going. Petrol and diesel on our forecourts may be horribly expensive but at least their purchase is a simple matter. You pay the price advertised on the sign.
Not so our domestic fuel bills. The menu of options described above is only the beginning for our gas and electric utilities. Most of them have 30 or 40 different tariffs, each with its own merits. When David Cameron made his off the cuff comment in the Commons last week about forcing energy companies to offer customers their lowest tariff, he stirred up a hornet's nest. Because the way fuel bills are constructed, it's almost impossible to tell what the best deal is. Price comparison websites can give you an indication of what would have been the best deal for you in the past, but have no way of knowing what the future deals will be, as the prices can and will change.
Of course, David Cameron has form on issues like this. So keen is he to appear to be a man of the people that he is given to making what he thinks are popular gestures which then turn out to be ill thought through. Or not thought through at all.
Had he called for energy bills to be simpler to understand, he might have been onto something. Had he demanded that the ludicrous two-tier tariffs, that all utility companies still base their billing on, be replaced with a petrol-pump style single price per kilowatt hour, he would have been making progress for all of us. At a glance we would be able to see who is offering what, and where we should place our money.
"Buy your first 10 litres for £2.00 and you can fill up the rest of the tank at just £1.15 per litre." Hmm, that sounds good. Or does it? Whilst you are trying to figure out if this is a good deal or not, you eyes alight on another option.
"Get your car serviced here and you can get 30p per litre off your petrol for six months." Excellent, you think. Except you now start wondering if its 30p off the first 10 litre price or the lower, follow-up price. Maybe it doesn't matter. Then there's another option.
"Pay by direct debit and we'll knock 5% off your annual bill." Gosh, this does sound good. A reward for loyalty. The more I spend, the more I save. You start to feel that you could spend your whole life cruising the motorways for free.
So you stand there on the forecourt not really knowing whether you are coming or going. You just wanted to fill up with petrol and you've ended up taking an IQ test and now you have a horrible feeling you've just failed.
I suspect you may know where this is going. Petrol and diesel on our forecourts may be horribly expensive but at least their purchase is a simple matter. You pay the price advertised on the sign.
Not so our domestic fuel bills. The menu of options described above is only the beginning for our gas and electric utilities. Most of them have 30 or 40 different tariffs, each with its own merits. When David Cameron made his off the cuff comment in the Commons last week about forcing energy companies to offer customers their lowest tariff, he stirred up a hornet's nest. Because the way fuel bills are constructed, it's almost impossible to tell what the best deal is. Price comparison websites can give you an indication of what would have been the best deal for you in the past, but have no way of knowing what the future deals will be, as the prices can and will change.
Of course, David Cameron has form on issues like this. So keen is he to appear to be a man of the people that he is given to making what he thinks are popular gestures which then turn out to be ill thought through. Or not thought through at all.
Had he called for energy bills to be simpler to understand, he might have been onto something. Had he demanded that the ludicrous two-tier tariffs, that all utility companies still base their billing on, be replaced with a petrol-pump style single price per kilowatt hour, he would have been making progress for all of us. At a glance we would be able to see who is offering what, and where we should place our money.
16 Aug 2012
Who are the real land scammers?
Land bank scams are back in the spotlight. Land banking is nothing new: it was a feature of the selfbuild scene when I first got involved around 20 years ago, and despite our best efforts, it's still very much around.
This is how it works. Unscrupulous people buy fields which never have a hope in hell of being built on and then flog off little chunks of these fields as building plots. They pay maybe £20k for the field, they then charge £10k for a dozen plots, and they pocket the difference.
The poor saps who are persuaded to buy the plots are left with a meaningless subdivision of a field which they don't even have access to, let alone any hope of building anything on it. It's a scam, pure and simple, but it's hard to outlaw because there is nothing illegal about subdividing a field and selling it off in parcels: the fraud relies on exaggerating the hope value placed on the plots and that can be difficult to prove, especially as the land bankers don't use conventional marketing channels, instead mostly relying on high-pressure sales techniques. They will hold out the prospect of a fat profit, but only if you move quickly. Oh, and you don't need to bother with a conveyancing solicitor — you don't need one to buy a car, do you? And this is less than a new car!
Anyway, despite lots of media exposure, and parliamentary questions and such, land banking scams are still with us and may in fact be getting worse. Such has been the publicity surrounding Grant Shapps's "selfbuild revolution" that there is now a whole new cohort of potential suckers out there who know nothing about the perils of land banking.
But whilst the land bankers might trouser the odd £10k from the unsuspecting public, there is a a much bigger scam going on down at the town hall and this is one that the Financial Services Authority will not be investigating. We are talking impact fees, or development contributions, and these mothers are big.
For decades, big housebuilders and developers have had to make infrastructure contributions in return for getting planning permissions. It was par for the course. "You wanna build 100 new homes here? Make 30 of them affordable, and give us a couple of million so we can build you a nice access road with its own roundabout. And some swings for the kiddies. There's a good boy."
But times change and this sort of conversation is no longer for the big guns. It's filtered down to individual selfbuilds and it may even be on its way towards people adding extensions. "You wanna add an extra bedroom? That'll be another desk in the primary skule and that costs us £20k." Long gone are the days when the rates would cover local expenditure: too much local government money comes from central funding, so it's hardly surprising that local government looks at innovative ways of raising extra cash. That won't lose any votes. The squeeze is on.
Trouble is this just may to stop building dead in its tracks. In the past few days, stories of selfbuilders being asked for a £50k contribution have hit my screen, and in one case, mentioned in a Jason Orme blog, £187k. Call it S106 payments, Affordable Housing Contributions, Community Infrastructure Levy, it all amounts to much the same thing - a stealth tax on development.
Now, arguably, if this is all done and dusted before the selfbuilder ever gets hold of the land, and the extra expense is made clear at the outset, it's no bad thing, as in theory, the fees will be deducted from the uplift in value from the granting of planning permission. But this isn't always the case, and lots of would-be selfbuilds in back gardens will be rendered unviable by the introduction of fees. It all begins to make the land bankers look like amateurs.
Behind all this is the very odd way in which land tenure is handled. You can nominally own a piece of land or a house but if you want to do something different with it, the decision rests with others, namely the council. This used to be an entirely political matter — you simply had to convince the planners and your neighbours. But, in these straightened times, it looks like it's going to have a financial element attached to it now, over and above the mere cost of applying for planning permission. In effect, planning permissions will be sold for whatever the market will bear and any uplift in value as a result of that permission will mainly accrue to the council.
So you can see that the two issues — land bank scams and council contributions — are in fact closely linked and reflect two sides of the same coin. Namely, that planning permission is worth far more than land itself, and that this represents a type of public ownership of land by stealth. Granting planning permission on agricultural land is very similar to printing money because it creates value: it's hardly surprising that the ones granting the permission — the councils — are now trying to get their hands on the spoils.
The message is that potential plot purchasers now have two sharks out there to watch out for. The first is to avoid buying a piece of land with no hope of ever getting planning permission: the second is to make sure that if the land does stand a chance of getting planning, that you will be able to afford to pay for it when the permission is granted.
This is how it works. Unscrupulous people buy fields which never have a hope in hell of being built on and then flog off little chunks of these fields as building plots. They pay maybe £20k for the field, they then charge £10k for a dozen plots, and they pocket the difference.
The poor saps who are persuaded to buy the plots are left with a meaningless subdivision of a field which they don't even have access to, let alone any hope of building anything on it. It's a scam, pure and simple, but it's hard to outlaw because there is nothing illegal about subdividing a field and selling it off in parcels: the fraud relies on exaggerating the hope value placed on the plots and that can be difficult to prove, especially as the land bankers don't use conventional marketing channels, instead mostly relying on high-pressure sales techniques. They will hold out the prospect of a fat profit, but only if you move quickly. Oh, and you don't need to bother with a conveyancing solicitor — you don't need one to buy a car, do you? And this is less than a new car!
Anyway, despite lots of media exposure, and parliamentary questions and such, land banking scams are still with us and may in fact be getting worse. Such has been the publicity surrounding Grant Shapps's "selfbuild revolution" that there is now a whole new cohort of potential suckers out there who know nothing about the perils of land banking.
But whilst the land bankers might trouser the odd £10k from the unsuspecting public, there is a a much bigger scam going on down at the town hall and this is one that the Financial Services Authority will not be investigating. We are talking impact fees, or development contributions, and these mothers are big.
For decades, big housebuilders and developers have had to make infrastructure contributions in return for getting planning permissions. It was par for the course. "You wanna build 100 new homes here? Make 30 of them affordable, and give us a couple of million so we can build you a nice access road with its own roundabout. And some swings for the kiddies. There's a good boy."
But times change and this sort of conversation is no longer for the big guns. It's filtered down to individual selfbuilds and it may even be on its way towards people adding extensions. "You wanna add an extra bedroom? That'll be another desk in the primary skule and that costs us £20k." Long gone are the days when the rates would cover local expenditure: too much local government money comes from central funding, so it's hardly surprising that local government looks at innovative ways of raising extra cash. That won't lose any votes. The squeeze is on.
Trouble is this just may to stop building dead in its tracks. In the past few days, stories of selfbuilders being asked for a £50k contribution have hit my screen, and in one case, mentioned in a Jason Orme blog, £187k. Call it S106 payments, Affordable Housing Contributions, Community Infrastructure Levy, it all amounts to much the same thing - a stealth tax on development.
Now, arguably, if this is all done and dusted before the selfbuilder ever gets hold of the land, and the extra expense is made clear at the outset, it's no bad thing, as in theory, the fees will be deducted from the uplift in value from the granting of planning permission. But this isn't always the case, and lots of would-be selfbuilds in back gardens will be rendered unviable by the introduction of fees. It all begins to make the land bankers look like amateurs.
Behind all this is the very odd way in which land tenure is handled. You can nominally own a piece of land or a house but if you want to do something different with it, the decision rests with others, namely the council. This used to be an entirely political matter — you simply had to convince the planners and your neighbours. But, in these straightened times, it looks like it's going to have a financial element attached to it now, over and above the mere cost of applying for planning permission. In effect, planning permissions will be sold for whatever the market will bear and any uplift in value as a result of that permission will mainly accrue to the council.
So you can see that the two issues — land bank scams and council contributions — are in fact closely linked and reflect two sides of the same coin. Namely, that planning permission is worth far more than land itself, and that this represents a type of public ownership of land by stealth. Granting planning permission on agricultural land is very similar to printing money because it creates value: it's hardly surprising that the ones granting the permission — the councils — are now trying to get their hands on the spoils.
The message is that potential plot purchasers now have two sharks out there to watch out for. The first is to avoid buying a piece of land with no hope of ever getting planning permission: the second is to make sure that if the land does stand a chance of getting planning, that you will be able to afford to pay for it when the permission is granted.
11 Jul 2012
To plan, or not to plan
Here's an interesting local story with national implications. Cambridge MP, LibDem Julian Huppert (pictured), won a ballot to introduce a private member's bill in the House of Commons and he elected to ask his constituents for some ideas. Top of the poll was the suggestion that we should stop converting disused pubs into flats. But there was a second leg to the bill as well which would stop existing premises being turned into supermarkets.
Now these issues have resonance in Cambridge because we have lost 20 pubs in recent years - all having made way for flats. And we have gained dozens of supermarkets, Tesco Expresses in particular, which have done for lots of independent shops. It's a process that is going on all over the land but in Cambridge it seems to be on steroids. The issue is, of course, the clone town, which everybody and their aunt hates, but which planning has no issue with.
But underlying this is a wider issue which rarely gets an airing and that is the right of an owner to do what they wish with their property. If their pub doesn't stack up financially, why shouldn't the landlord be able to sell it to a developer? If a shop or warehouse is losing money, surely the owner should be able to sell it on to the highest bidder? If Huppert's bill was to become law — apparently this is most unlikely — then it would become the thin end of the wedge and the next thing would be neighbours demanding a veto over who you can sell your house to.
Strip it away still further and you can see the essential dilemma that underlies all issues to do with planning permission. What does "ownership of property" really entail? Or, to put it another way, how much control should your neighbours have over what you can or cannot do with your own land or property?
I would say that our attitudes are now thoroughly inconsistent. Everybody pays lip service to doing away with red tape and making planning permission easier, quicker and simpler to obtain — it's easy to back such notions when they have no direct effect on you. But nobody likes it when a much loved neighbourhood changes, when a once loved pub turns into yet more student accommodation or a little used snooker hall is scheduled to transform into a chain supermarket. Or a neighbour builds a sodding great extension blocking out the light. Or a village is scheduled to become home to a windfarm. Yes, in instances like this, we are nearly all NIMBYs, we sign petitions, we lobby MPs. Which is how Julian Huppert no doubt got the idea of introducing this bill.
But has he thought it through at a philosophical level? His bill may be democratic, but it's hardly liberal.
19 Jun 2012
Is Thorium a Super Fuel?
Yesterday, I pitched up at Cambridge University's Engineering Dept to hear thorium evangelist Rick Martin talking about his new book, Super Fuel, subtitled Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future.
For those of you not familiar with the buzz about thorium, it's an alternative to using uranium as a fuel for nuclear reactors. It's abundant, it's much easier to manage and the waste and proliferation issues are greatly reduced (though not eliminated). I could go on, but you'd do better to look at the book.
What's just as interesting to me is that thorium has evangelists. Evangelists like Apple used to have evangelists? Yes, not so very different. But why would anyone evangelise nuclear power? Well, just as Apple was once a David pitching itself against Microsoft's Goliath, so thorium is very much a minnow when pitched against mainstream nuclear power. It's not just the fuel, it's how you use it and the buzz is all around liquid fluoride thorium reactors, known in thorium circles as Lifters, which don't need pressurising and have in-built passive protection against meltdowns.
This is not new technology. A Lifter was built and run for a while at the Oak Ridge Labs in the USA in the 1970s by Alvin Weinberg, the godfather of the thorium brigade. It worked fine but it got closed down because the USA decided that uranium reactors suited them better (at least in part because they could be used to produce enriched uranium for bombs). Since then very little has happened until very recently; the Chinese are now building a couple of lifters, and India is also starting to use thorium though as a solid fuel, not a liquid.
In the West, it's mostly down to the evangelists, notably Kirk Sorensen in the USA - you can watch his TED talk here:it's only 10 minutes and, boy, does he sound like Steve Jobs. Rick Martin seems to be his John the Baptist, not as technical but just as keen. Sorenson's and Martin's enthusiasm is infectious because, due to them, we know have our very own British evangelist, Bryony Worthington, who just happens to have a seat in the House of Lords. Worthington started out as an anti-nuclear campaigner at Friends of the Earth but re-assessed her views after coming into contact with Kirk Sorensen and finding out about thorium. There is also a Weinberg Foundation dedicated to spreading the thorium message.
I'm afraid I'm a sucker for all this. I don't know enough about nuclear physics to judge whether thorium is quite as wonderful as the evangelists make out, but there is such a buzz about it that it's hard not to get excited about the possibilities, especially as I feel so bleak about so many of the other options facing us. Hell, thorium even has its own skeptic, Arjun Makhjani, who makes nit-picking points about why it might not be such a great idea. You can hear him debate with Rick Martin here. Somehow, having a tame skeptic makes it all the more believable.
Martin made the telling point that nuclear R&D pretty much ground to a halt after Weinberg was sacked from his job by Nixon in 1973. Then, after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, it all just froze up. Nuclear power went right out of fashion and no young grad student worth their salt ever considered dedicating their life to nuclear research. Renewables were just so much more fashionable. But now it's changed. Martin said the current situation reminds him of Silicon Valley c 1980 when there was IBM who were everything in computing and all these little start-ups with very different visions of what might happen.
This tacitly acknowledges that thorium lifters are not the only nuclear game changers in town and that there are other vision of where we could go with nuclear slowly gathering momentum, notably the travelling wave reactors which are being backed by Bill Gates. There are other designs too - known generically as 4th Generation Reactors. And let's not ignore the €10 billion being spent on the experimental Iter fusion reactor in France.
After decades in a semi-moribund state, nuclear research has once again come alive, promising solutions to many of the age-old issues that have dogged the industry. But to date it's only thorium and its lifters that seems to get evangelists excited. It's hard to know quite why this is but I feel that in large part it's because of the back story of how the initial research was shelved and forgotten and how it's been unearthed by an unlikely, non-establishment hero. There is a touch of the fairy tale here, a touch of magic. Nuclear power badly needed re-branding and Kirk Sorensen may just be the man to do it.
For those of you not familiar with the buzz about thorium, it's an alternative to using uranium as a fuel for nuclear reactors. It's abundant, it's much easier to manage and the waste and proliferation issues are greatly reduced (though not eliminated). I could go on, but you'd do better to look at the book.
What's just as interesting to me is that thorium has evangelists. Evangelists like Apple used to have evangelists? Yes, not so very different. But why would anyone evangelise nuclear power? Well, just as Apple was once a David pitching itself against Microsoft's Goliath, so thorium is very much a minnow when pitched against mainstream nuclear power. It's not just the fuel, it's how you use it and the buzz is all around liquid fluoride thorium reactors, known in thorium circles as Lifters, which don't need pressurising and have in-built passive protection against meltdowns.
This is not new technology. A Lifter was built and run for a while at the Oak Ridge Labs in the USA in the 1970s by Alvin Weinberg, the godfather of the thorium brigade. It worked fine but it got closed down because the USA decided that uranium reactors suited them better (at least in part because they could be used to produce enriched uranium for bombs). Since then very little has happened until very recently; the Chinese are now building a couple of lifters, and India is also starting to use thorium though as a solid fuel, not a liquid.
In the West, it's mostly down to the evangelists, notably Kirk Sorensen in the USA - you can watch his TED talk here:it's only 10 minutes and, boy, does he sound like Steve Jobs. Rick Martin seems to be his John the Baptist, not as technical but just as keen. Sorenson's and Martin's enthusiasm is infectious because, due to them, we know have our very own British evangelist, Bryony Worthington, who just happens to have a seat in the House of Lords. Worthington started out as an anti-nuclear campaigner at Friends of the Earth but re-assessed her views after coming into contact with Kirk Sorensen and finding out about thorium. There is also a Weinberg Foundation dedicated to spreading the thorium message.
I'm afraid I'm a sucker for all this. I don't know enough about nuclear physics to judge whether thorium is quite as wonderful as the evangelists make out, but there is such a buzz about it that it's hard not to get excited about the possibilities, especially as I feel so bleak about so many of the other options facing us. Hell, thorium even has its own skeptic, Arjun Makhjani, who makes nit-picking points about why it might not be such a great idea. You can hear him debate with Rick Martin here. Somehow, having a tame skeptic makes it all the more believable.
Martin made the telling point that nuclear R&D pretty much ground to a halt after Weinberg was sacked from his job by Nixon in 1973. Then, after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, it all just froze up. Nuclear power went right out of fashion and no young grad student worth their salt ever considered dedicating their life to nuclear research. Renewables were just so much more fashionable. But now it's changed. Martin said the current situation reminds him of Silicon Valley c 1980 when there was IBM who were everything in computing and all these little start-ups with very different visions of what might happen.
This tacitly acknowledges that thorium lifters are not the only nuclear game changers in town and that there are other vision of where we could go with nuclear slowly gathering momentum, notably the travelling wave reactors which are being backed by Bill Gates. There are other designs too - known generically as 4th Generation Reactors. And let's not ignore the €10 billion being spent on the experimental Iter fusion reactor in France.
After decades in a semi-moribund state, nuclear research has once again come alive, promising solutions to many of the age-old issues that have dogged the industry. But to date it's only thorium and its lifters that seems to get evangelists excited. It's hard to know quite why this is but I feel that in large part it's because of the back story of how the initial research was shelved and forgotten and how it's been unearthed by an unlikely, non-establishment hero. There is a touch of the fairy tale here, a touch of magic. Nuclear power badly needed re-branding and Kirk Sorensen may just be the man to do it.
13 Jun 2012
Is there anything good in the Green Deal?
Yesterday, I went to a meeting in London put on by SPAB (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) called to update people about their research into energy efficiency measures used in older properties. SPAB have become remarkably active in this field recently and there were nine presentations, each on different projects.
At the very heart of this research is a central fear that adding piles of insulation into old buildings (or indeed new ones) may cause havoc with the moisture levels in the fabric and may end up causing more harm than good. All across the country, researchers are beavering away measuring temperatures, U values, airtightness, relative humidity levels, rainfall, trying to work out what happens to homes both before and after treatment. What emerged was how little we really know about the behaviour of buildings, and how little research has been done.
The establishment view is summarised by two standards, BR 443 which deals with heat loss and sits behind the SAP calculations and BS 5250 which deals with condensation risk. In theory, if your wall assembly (or roof or floor) meets BR 443 and passes the BS 5250 test, then all is hunky dory. But in real life, most of the researchers were saying that neither standard really cuts the mustard and that the moisture modelling suggested by BS5250 is so simplistic that it's a veritable danger.
Which begs the question, what should replace it? Much was made of the more complex, dynamic WUFI model, though some pointed out that not everyone agrees that WUFI is the answer. Surely the Germans would know the answer? Maybe, but Neil May made the interesting point that he had reviewed much of the German language literature and wasn't convinced that their understanding was much better than ours. It seems that moisture behaviour in wall and roof assemblies remains poorly understood and therefore unpredictable.
So what's this all got to do with the Green Deal? Actually, it's pretty central because here we have a government policy which is designed to bounce us into both internal and external wall insulation in older properties, precisely the sort of measures which SPAB are highlighting may cause future problems. The Green Deal wasn't the purpose of this meeting, which was arranged months ago, but nevertheless the Green Deal did rather dominate proceedings and several interesting things came to light. To their credit, DECC (the government department behind the Green Deal) provided two spokepoeple, Nicola O'Connor and Steven Daniels, who explained some of the logic behind the recent publications, but they shot off pretty soon after their presentation and weren't around to hear the deluge of disquiet that followed.
One issue that kept emerging was the initial survey. There are, apparently, 45 measures which might be eligible for Green Deal finance, but which of these are suitable in any given household depend on the survey assessment by a professional who, it emerged, is going to be paid the princely sum of around £30 for undertaking this work. How much time is that going to buy? 10 minutes, if you are lucky. And will the advice be any good? More likely, it will be sales advice with commission for any number of supposedly Clean Tech businesses. "Will the survey be independent?" rang out the question from the floor. "We can't insist on this, but it will be impartial," replied DECC. "Hmmm", went the audience. A good independent survey, it was pointed out, like the ones Parity Projects undertake, is more likely to cost around £300-£500. Are "ordinary people" going to be happy to fork out an amount like this for a proper survey which might tell them to do nothing?
Then there is the warranty/guarantee. Apparently, there is to be some such scheme in place for Green Deal work, but exactly how it might work is hard to fathom. 25 years was mentioned, but can any building work be guaranteed for 25 years? This seems fanciful. And the loan is to be attached to the utility bills of the house, rather than the person who negotiated it, so if the house is subsequently sold, the loan goes with it.
Can you imagine what a sales boost this will be? "Oh, by the way, you have to pay £500 a year extra on your fuel bills until 2030 for all that insulation we stuck on the bedroom walls, and that air source heat pump which is in the garage but which we don't use very much."
More to the point, can you imagine big finance houses wanting to lend money on these terms? Combine the risk of an-as-yet unknown borrower with a warranty for work undertaken by others and just what would the interest rate be? That's a key point, and one that remains to be addressed. But if it can't beat a bank loan, or peer-to-peer lender Zopa, then what's the point bothering?
All in all, not a good word was to be heard for the Green Deal. I was almost beginning to feel sorry for it by the end of the day. Almost, but not quite.
At the very heart of this research is a central fear that adding piles of insulation into old buildings (or indeed new ones) may cause havoc with the moisture levels in the fabric and may end up causing more harm than good. All across the country, researchers are beavering away measuring temperatures, U values, airtightness, relative humidity levels, rainfall, trying to work out what happens to homes both before and after treatment. What emerged was how little we really know about the behaviour of buildings, and how little research has been done.
The establishment view is summarised by two standards, BR 443 which deals with heat loss and sits behind the SAP calculations and BS 5250 which deals with condensation risk. In theory, if your wall assembly (or roof or floor) meets BR 443 and passes the BS 5250 test, then all is hunky dory. But in real life, most of the researchers were saying that neither standard really cuts the mustard and that the moisture modelling suggested by BS5250 is so simplistic that it's a veritable danger.
Which begs the question, what should replace it? Much was made of the more complex, dynamic WUFI model, though some pointed out that not everyone agrees that WUFI is the answer. Surely the Germans would know the answer? Maybe, but Neil May made the interesting point that he had reviewed much of the German language literature and wasn't convinced that their understanding was much better than ours. It seems that moisture behaviour in wall and roof assemblies remains poorly understood and therefore unpredictable.
So what's this all got to do with the Green Deal? Actually, it's pretty central because here we have a government policy which is designed to bounce us into both internal and external wall insulation in older properties, precisely the sort of measures which SPAB are highlighting may cause future problems. The Green Deal wasn't the purpose of this meeting, which was arranged months ago, but nevertheless the Green Deal did rather dominate proceedings and several interesting things came to light. To their credit, DECC (the government department behind the Green Deal) provided two spokepoeple, Nicola O'Connor and Steven Daniels, who explained some of the logic behind the recent publications, but they shot off pretty soon after their presentation and weren't around to hear the deluge of disquiet that followed.
One issue that kept emerging was the initial survey. There are, apparently, 45 measures which might be eligible for Green Deal finance, but which of these are suitable in any given household depend on the survey assessment by a professional who, it emerged, is going to be paid the princely sum of around £30 for undertaking this work. How much time is that going to buy? 10 minutes, if you are lucky. And will the advice be any good? More likely, it will be sales advice with commission for any number of supposedly Clean Tech businesses. "Will the survey be independent?" rang out the question from the floor. "We can't insist on this, but it will be impartial," replied DECC. "Hmmm", went the audience. A good independent survey, it was pointed out, like the ones Parity Projects undertake, is more likely to cost around £300-£500. Are "ordinary people" going to be happy to fork out an amount like this for a proper survey which might tell them to do nothing?
Then there is the warranty/guarantee. Apparently, there is to be some such scheme in place for Green Deal work, but exactly how it might work is hard to fathom. 25 years was mentioned, but can any building work be guaranteed for 25 years? This seems fanciful. And the loan is to be attached to the utility bills of the house, rather than the person who negotiated it, so if the house is subsequently sold, the loan goes with it.
Can you imagine what a sales boost this will be? "Oh, by the way, you have to pay £500 a year extra on your fuel bills until 2030 for all that insulation we stuck on the bedroom walls, and that air source heat pump which is in the garage but which we don't use very much."
More to the point, can you imagine big finance houses wanting to lend money on these terms? Combine the risk of an-as-yet unknown borrower with a warranty for work undertaken by others and just what would the interest rate be? That's a key point, and one that remains to be addressed. But if it can't beat a bank loan, or peer-to-peer lender Zopa, then what's the point bothering?
All in all, not a good word was to be heard for the Green Deal. I was almost beginning to feel sorry for it by the end of the day. Almost, but not quite.
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