Myles Allen and the Mail on Sunday

Good piece here by Joe Romm in response to the Mail on Sunday's latest tirade against climate change policy. It raises some interesting points.

Myles Allen who wrote this piece in the MoS is a respected climate scientist. He is now a professor at Oxford and not just any professor but head of the Climate Dynamics group at the university's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department. That's about as respectable as a climate scientist can get. So why is he choosing to appear in the Mail on Sunday, which has been pursuing a relentless and highly effective campaign against the state of climate science?

In order to get Allen on board, the Mail had to make a concession, because no way was Allen going to say that climate change isn't happening at all, or that it won't be harmful. So here, for the first time in yonks, you have what amounts to a retraction by the Mail. They allow Allen to write:

Do I think we’re doomed to disastrous warming? Absolutely not. But do I think we are doomed if we persist in our current approach to climate policy?

I’m afraid the answer is yes. Subsidising wind turbines and cutting down on your own carbon footprint might mean we burn through the vast quantity of carbon contained in the planet’s fossil fuels a little slower. But it won’t make any difference if we burn it in the end.

Now quite what all those loyal Mail readers think of this statement, having been weaned on a diet of Rose, Delingpole and Booker, one can only guess at. But having momentarily spat out their cornflakes, normal service is quickly resumed because Allen then proceeds into a lengthy and mostly non-sensical diatribe about the wonders of carbon capture and storage (CCS), and the demerits of every other mitigation or low carbon generation policy you can think of.

What's bizarre is that Allen denounces the current crop of policies as ruinously expensive and hopelessly ineffective, whilst not presenting any evidence that CCS is any better. My two favourite sentences are:

Frankly, I’d rather pay an engineer in Poland to actually dispose of carbon dioxide than some Brussels eco-yuppie to trade it around.

Why Poland? Aren't we capable of burying our own CO2? Or is Poland being annexed (again) so that we can turn it into a waste dump?

and

If you’re using fossil carbon to drive a car or fly a plane, you just have to pay someone else to bury CO2 for you.

Like who? And where exactly are they going to bury the CO2 coming out of the exhaust of the plane I am flying in? Or is this just code for offsetting, the sort of scam run by your typical Brussells eco-yuppie?

Allen's CCS solution to the climate change problem is worthy of debate, but just because he's a noted climate scientist doesn't make his views on what we should or should not do about CO2 dumping any more important or relevant than any other reasonably informed individual. But if you are going to argue a case for CCS on a major public platform, you would do well to marshall some coherent facts and statistics, not to mention some indication of comparative costs. Now it may be that he has been heavily edited and that what he has to say makes more sense that it appears to in this article, but then again he didn't have to write this piece.

Allen may now struggle to hang onto the respect he has gleaned as a climate scientist. The article shows the dangers inherent when scientists leave their labs and cross over into areas of policy where evidence is sketchy at best. He's managed to get the Mail on Sunday to make an admission that climate change is real and potentially devastating, but in doing so he has made himself look like an idiot.

Should we engineer the climate?

Just been to a fascinating talk given by @hughhunt, an Australian academic based in Cambridge, about geo-engineering. Or climate engineering as he prefers to call it, because everyone thinks that geo-engineering is just groundworks by a fancy name. We are not talking groundworks here, but climate control. Specifically the idea that we may be able to mitigate the effects of climate change by tinkering with the atmosphere.

Hugh Hunt's research project involves the feasibility of floating a series of giant, Wembley Stadium, sized balloons 20km up into the stratosphere, each connected to the Earth's surface by a huge hosepipe, through which we would squirt titanium oxide. Why titanium oxide? It's relatively inert and believed to be fairly harmless, it being a key ingredient in white paint and sunscreen.

In fact sunscreen is an apposite metaphor because it would be the equivalent of coating the entire planet with Factor 30. In theory, it would be possible to reduce global surface temperatures by as much as 2°C using this technique. A similar effect is observed when volcanos emit sulphur dioxide as high levels and the sun gets screened out for a while afterwards. We could do it with SO2, but TiO2 is probably preferable.

That's not to say there wouldn't be issues. Hunt identified a few. The release would have to take place around the Equator because the air in the stratosphere spreads out towards the poles from there. There is no telling it would be as effective at the poles as it might be at the Equator. There might be interaction with the oceans, or with the ozone layer. And there might well be many insuperable technical issues to resolve - like how to handle storms, and what happens if the 20km long hosepipe comes loose.

And there is of course the moral hazard of dealing with the symptoms of CO2 build-up, not the root cause. It's nicely dealt with on Wikipedia.

But the really interesting thing about all this is that the preliminary costings suggest that the total cost for a project like this would be in the low billions, much less than building a single nuke, in fact much less than almost any other carbon reducing projects you might care to think of. In fact a similar amount to how much Sheik Mansour is currently investing in Manchester City. Rather than breaking the back of the cash-strapped governments around the world, it's a project which could conceivably be paid for by a few wealthy individuals or even private equity - insurance companies anyone?

Old House Eco Handbook: a review

Marianne Suhr and Roger Hunt have written an important book at an important moment in the history of our treatment of our housing stock in the UK. They are attempting to meld two very distinct movements into one, and it’s not an easy marriage. It’s professional production values — it is a beautiful book — and it’s almost coffee-table aesthetic pull the reader into believing that this is a book of elegant answers, whereas the truth is that it’s actually full of uncomfortable questions.

The Old House bit is where both Marianne and Roger come from. In this instance, we are talking about the legacy of William Morris and in particular SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, who sponsored the book. Now SPAB was formed in 1877 and in its day it was undoubtedly radical: it was (I think) the first organisation to draw our attention to the value of the past and called on homeowners to stop knocking their homes about and start respecting what they already had. SPAB was a forerunner of the heritage movement, long before the National Trust existed and long before we started listing old buildings.

As heritage has become mainstream, SPAB has changed with the times. SPAB now spends much of its resources on education, dispensing invaluable advice on ancient building materials and techniques and gradually building up a pool of craftspeople who can work in ways sympathetic to old buildings. They have an affinity with natural building materials like lime, horsehair, hemp and wood wool, some of which were used by our forefathers and some of which weren’t.

Roll forward to today and we have a new challenge facing us, the need to retrofit our existing housing stock, the very stuff of the Green Deal. As the preface says: “How times have changed. Now eco-retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient and sustainable is seen as an integral part of repair and maintenance.”

One can only surmise what Morris would have made of “eco-retrofitting.” He railed against the “destructive restoration” practiced by contemporary homeowners and architects. Would he have been a climate change skeptic who would have protested against wind turbines and solar panels, not to mention double-glazing? Or would he have rallied to the greater cause and seen that the preservation of our climate was critical to the preservation of our built environment, and thus become an ardent eco-retrofitter? This uncomfortable dichotomy is still very much alive and sits at the heart of this book.

Essentially, to undertake an eco-retrofit we have to rank our actions in terms of overall importance. We have to face some very difficult questions:

• Is the aim of a retrofit simply to reduce carbon emissions? Or to save energy? They are not the same thing. A renewable heating system might tick the first box without altering the house fabric at all. But to save energy, you have to attack the fabric.

• How much can you attack the fabric an old building without altering its character? There is a danger that you will ruin the very soul of the house if you tamper with it too much. There is also a danger that, if you use the wrong materials, you might end up ruining the structure itself.

Marianne and Roger argue that using natural materials is the way forward, in that they are less likely to ruin an old house, less likely to cause interstitial condensation and will go much of the way towards saving energy.

But how much of this is based on sound building science, and how much is fashion? That’s another very difficult question which we don’t have an answer to yet. There are a number of references in the book to the importance of having breathing structures, but breathing in building terms is a frustratingly hard concept to pin down. They give (in Ch 3) a very good analysis of the way moisture interacts with building materials, both ancient and modern, and when you’ve finished it, you can’t help feeling that you are none the wiser. That’s not because their analysis is lacking, but because the whole subject is so damned slippery. We know all the many different ways that water interacts with buildings, but that’s not the same thing as knowing what will happen when, and in what order, or what damage, if any, will occur. Every building is unique and the way it behaves is unpredictable. The older the building, the more unpredictable it is likely to be.

Consequently, the advice given often falls a little short of what’s really needed in a handbook. It often falls into the trap of listing all the questions you should be asking, rather than providing answers. This criticism sounds mean and churlish and, if so, I should apologise, because it’s a trap I fall right into with my own book. I know many people look up to me as an expert on modern housebuilding, but just like Marianne and Roger, what I’m best at doing is pointing out how difficult it is to get it right.

I just think that renovating old houses is a far harder task than building new ones, so the lack of clarity is hardly surprising. I also know that SPAB is currently sponsoring a load of research into what actually happens when you undertake an eco retrofit, so that in time we should be able to be far more definitive about the subject. In the meantime, this handbook gives a very good summary of what we currently know and don’t know. Frankly, you’d be daft not to own it if you were about to undertake an Eco Renovation whatever age your house might be.


To order Old House Eco Handbook at the special offer price of £24.00 inc. UK p&p (RRP: £30.00) please call Bookpoint on 01235 400400 and quote the code 46OHEH.

Eric gets in a Pickle

I've written extensively on the uniquely Conservative dilemma between growth and conservation. It keeps rearing its ugly head. And the latest to fall foul of this ugly head syndrome is none other than Eric Pickles, who is the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. His humble pie moment is here.


Eric is a gruff, no-nonsense Yorkshireman, immersed in the Thatcherite traditions of hard work, getting ahead and despising slackers. He's set his heart on cutting red tape and last year he came up with a wheeze to make building big extensions easier by tinkering with Permitted Development Rights (PD Rights). Now PD Rights have been around as long as Planning Permission (1948 if you must) and they are used to define the lower limits of the planners remit. If your proposed works are deemed to be insignificant enough, you can just plough ahead with them using your PD Rights and neither the planners nor your neighbours can have any say in the matter.

That's all very well but, as with most schemes which set out to make matters simple and uncontroversial, you immediately run into problems of definition. What exactly are our PD Rights? Do they ever change? Can we lose them? Where can we find out? All good questions. And the answers are none too simple. Over the years, the planners have worked out various routines to determine whether or not your proposed works require planning permission and the best available resource around at the moment for those of us in England is the Planning Portal website. Look at the Do You Need Permission page. I must admit, it's pretty good.

As it stands, you can build an extension up to 3m long on an attached house and 4m on a detached house. That's at it's simplest. In fact there are currently 17 sub conditions you have to meet if you are to not infringe your PD Rights, but in essence you can build a single storey extension this sort of size without planning permission. Unless of course you've already used up your PD Rights - but that's another story: to quote Coldplay no less, nobody said it was easy.

Now our Eric's big wheeze was in essence to redraw this length of extension limit at 8m, but just for a period of three years, his thinking being that this would unleash a wave of extension putting-upping across the country as lots of frustrated mini-Pickles let lose their inner-Thatcher and built over their tiny garden-sized green belts.

Why 8m? I have no idea. Why not 10? Or 16? To quote from the same Coldplay tune: I was just guessing at numbers and figures, pulling the puzzles apart.

Whether this really would burst a dam of pent-up large extension demand is questionable. It wasn't that no one was previously free to build an 8m extension: it was just that it required planning permission. And 90% of domestic planning permissions get consent. Ok, there is the extra cost involved, and the lengthy delay, but an 8m extension is not something to be undertaken in a hurry, so in the great scheme of things, these costs and delays are minor.

Anyway, Eric's 8m extension idea ran into flak from that other kind of Tory, the old-moneyed landlord type, that quite likes the world as it is. It's person, in this instance, was none other than Zac Goldsmith. He went ballistic. He foresaw not a building boom, but an explosion in neighbour-to neighbour disputes as homeowners threw up horrid flat-roofed sheds, blocking the light and spoiling the view. Yuck!

A fine old barney ensues. Nobody said it was easy, but no one ever said it would be this hard.

In the end, Eric has to climb down. Hence the letter.


Only it's not a simple climbdown, it's a compromise. Rather than having to apply for planning permission if you want to build up to 8m, you can simply ask your neighbours if its OK. Here are the six stages:

• Homeowners wishing to build extensions under the new powers would notify their local council with the details.
  
• The council would then inform the adjoining neighbours – this already happens for planning applications.
  
• If no objections are made to the council by the neighbours within a set period, the development can proceed.
  
• If objections are raised by neighbours, the council will consider whether the development would have an unacceptable impact on neighbours’ amenity.
  
• This is a form of ‘prior approval’ process which allows for consideration by ward councillors, and (if the council wishes) by a Planning Committee.
  
• There will be no fee for householders to go through this process. 
  
  

It's actually ended up being a tiny change on what we already have. Only if the neighbours are all perfectly happy with your proposals can you proceed without intervention. If the neighbours' object — and 8m is a big extension so the chances are they will object — then it goes through something very like planning permission but without any fees attached. So that will immediately make it incredibly popular with the town hall planning departments — doing the job they do already but without any fee.

And what Eric has done now is create a middle tier of confusion somewhere between conventional PD Rights and conventional planning permission. Sort of PD Rights Plus or planning-lite.

In other words, where there was once a little clarity, he now sews the seeds of confusion. This is what passes for cutting red tape these days. One wonders why they bother?

PS The Coldplay song is The Scientist, one of their best. 

Selfbuild to be exempt from CIL?

News today that the government is considering exempting selfbuilders from the dreaded Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). This is A GOOD THING. At least it is for all of us involved in selfbuild, as the CIL was threatening to derail may selfbuilds because it was so damned expensive. However, we must beware unintended consequences.

My first thoughts on the consultation have been posted back to DCLG. Here they are:

I am Mark Brinkley, selfbuild author and consultant and chair of one of the 2011 Self-build Industry Working Group Committees, hosted by DCLG. I would like to comment on the selfbuld sections of the consultation. I will answer Q21 and 22 only.

Q21 Should we introduce a relief from the payment of the levy for self-build homes for individuals as set out above?

Yes. An excellent idea.

Q22 Do you agree that this approach provides a suitable framework to provide relief for genuine self-builders?

I think the proposals could be improved.

I think it's quite right to attempt to distinguish between self-builders and speculative builders, but it's not always easy. Sometimes some projects can be a mixture of both.

1. The seven year occupation rule. This seems an inordinately long time to establish a selfbuild. Job changes, divorce, bankruptcy or even death may well intervene before seven years is up. I would have though that two years is long enough to establish whether it's a selfbuild.

If it must be seven years, why not place a charge against the property which would require the payment of the CIL if sold before that time? Maybe the charge could reduce - i.e. 100% in first two years, trailing down to zero in Year 7.

2. Documentary evidence on completion. I would have thought that the original person applying for relief would have to prove that they are in occupation as the principle householder (via a rates bill) and that this was their principle private residence. All the other matters you call on as evidence may well not be in place on many selfbuilds. For instance, warranties are not mandatory (many selfbuilders don't buy them but use architects certificates instead). VAT refunds don't take place if the entire contract is let to a VAT registered builder. Self-build mortgages are similarly often not used — standard offset mortgages are almost as common.

In any event, many of these features of selfbuild are not concerned with what happens to a selfbuild after occupation. The house could be let out or become a holiday home and we would be none the wiser.

There might also be issues with loft-style apartments which are sub divided by developers and are sold as shells, to be fitted out by purchasers. The fitting out stage is often classed as selfbuild for VAT purposes. Would you want to offer CIL exemptions on these?

There might also be issues with group schemes where a company is used to purchase the land and deal with planning permission, but the intention is to split the scheme into selfbuilds. Would these fall foul of the qualification rules?

In summary, I think it's complicated and that it will not be straightforward to distinguish between genuine and sham selfbuilds. However, that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It's just that I don't think the qualifying matters you present in §82 and §83 are tight enough.

3. The proposal as it stands doesn't attempt to distinguish between genuine local need and trophy homes. Why should someone building a ten-bedroom mansion be exempt from CIL, whilst a small local developer building starter homes for resale have to pay? This seems unfair. I feel there should be some size limit placed on qualification for selfbuild relief. I would suggest 200m2 internal floor area, which is large enough for a five bedroomed family home. Or perhaps the size threshold could be left up to the local authority, which would be more in tune with local needs?

Another option (the modest house proposal) would be to exempt selfbuilders from the CIL for a threshold of, say, the first 100m2 internal floor area. If they want to build bigger, they can, but they would start contributing to CIL at the standard m2 rate for floor areas above the threshold. Example: a 250m2 house would be due to pay CIL on 150m2 only, being the 250m2 less the 100m2 threshold. However, this proposal risks being abused by selfbuilders adding extensions soon after occupation - it may be too difficult to police and/or would lead to unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. There might also be issues with measuring internal floor area, for which there is no British standard method.

4. The proposal risks creating a two-tier land market where selfbuilders would obtain a substantial advantage over speculative developers for market land. The higher the local CIL levels, the bigger the selfbuild advantage would be. I would expect lobbying from small builders against this proposal for precisely this reason. However, if you wish to promote selfbuild in the way it occurs in many other countries, then CIL exemption will be a powerful tool.

Selfbuild as a Political Football

Last week the Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank, published a report called A Right to Build. The subtitle, Local Homes for Local People, seems to have been lifted straight from the League of Gentlemen, and if the comic reference was unintentional, it is matched by a script that looks like it was written by David Brent after a session down the pub.

The problem is that when you put Tories in front of this notorious bar chart, (NB it that shows that we in the UK don’t really get selfbuild), they immediately jump to the wrong conclusions. Now Alex Morton, author of this report, jumps to a very different conclusion to the ones I have heard voiced so far, but it’s still way off the mark.

Morton’s big idea is that local authorities that fail to hit their own housing targets should be required to release land for self-build housing to local people. This would encourage speed and realism; realistic targets, based on politically acceptable self-build homes.

So just where exactly is this new building land coming from? Here they have dreamed up a ruse known as a Community Land Auction (CLA). Only a right-wing think tank could come up with anything so daft. Here’s Morton’s explanation:

The CLA process involves the council stating that they want land for a set level of homes to be put forward for development. Landowners can come forward offering their land at a specific price in a ‘sealed bid’ auction. No one would know what others were offering. The lowest priced land is granted permission, and then the next lowest priced land, and then the next lowest, and so on, until enough land is released for development to hit the target.

So where exactly would the cheapest land be located? You guessed it. In the worst location. Probably next to a motorway or under a flight path, probably three miles from the nearest shop where there are no roads, no infrastructure, no schools and nothing for company except the adjacent parcel of crap land where the second cheapest plot would be. This really is not much better than gulag development, out of sight and out of mind.

OK , you might argue that this is like a re-casting of the 30s plotlands developments where people from the big cities were offered small-holding-sized plots for next-to-nothing in the middle of nowhere, but the idea back then was that the pioneer plotlanders would be able to make a living from horticulture or market gardening on the land. I don’t think this is what the Policy Exchange is on about.

Then there’s the local bit which they hope will defuse the NIMBY factor, by taking the overt speculation out of the equation. Instead of having land divided up in private deals between councils, landowners and developers (what happens now), the Policy Exchange hopes that there will be a lengthy queue of prospective selfbuilders forming a waiting list for the newly released land, merrily waiving their rates bills to prove local residence qualifications and their chequebooks to pay the Community Infrastructure Levy.

This seems to be based on the compelling statistic that 400,000 people search Rightmove for building plots every month. Well, I’m one of them, but I don’t want to live on a squatter camp sandwiched between the M11 and the Stansted runway. And just how many of this 400,000 are in a position to raise finance and take on a major building project? I suspect very few.

Where it all gets extremely silly is in imagining that selfbuild is so popular that opposition from the community will just melt away:

On the national stage, this policy will help the push for more homes. Those opposing all development will be unable to hide behind nonsense about opposing greedy developers. Opposing these reforms would clearly mean denying an ordinary family the home they need. Supporting these reforms will show that politicians are in favour of ‘the little guy’ and squeezed ordinary working people trying to get on in life – exactly the group which all parties say that they are keen to support.

What do they smoke down at the Policy Exchange? With friends like this, the selfbuild movement better watch out because the goodwill that currently exists towards selfbuild will evaporate very quickly. We will be about as popular with the local Tories as the gypsies down at Dale Farm.

It gets worse. Morton supplies a helpful timeline on how this new policy might work:

Shortfall announced (Mid-July 2013)
Land Auctions (three months from August to November)
Planning permission granted on specific sites (November onward)
Plots allocated and can be traded (two weeks in November/December)
Neighbourhood plans for specific sites created and building starts (December 2013 onward)

Result? 100,000 new selfbuild homes ready for occupation sometime next year. I suspect Morton spent too many of his teenage years playing at being mayor of Sim City, because if he thinks that timeline is realistic, he cannot have first emerged from his bedroom more than three weeks ago.

Ok,I know that the Germans build this number of selfbuild homes every year, but they have been building up to this level for decades. They have an industry in place to service this amount of custom building. Plus they practice something very similar to compulsory land purchases, with the local councils deciding where these new homes should be located. Being a right-leaning think tank, the Policy Exchange can’t bring itself to mention a phrase like Compulsory Purchase (unless of course they are promoting high speed rail links, but that’s another story), so they come up with the ludicrous concept of the Community Land Auction instead.

If we want to copy the Continental housebuilding models (and I think we should), can we at least pay them the respect of understanding how they work, and not try to promote such hare-brained, ill-thought-out solutions. The future for selfbuild in the UK still looks rosy, but it's never going to be an overnight panacea for the unpopular housing market we have created and it's ludicrous and potentially damaging to pretend it could be.