Energy Efficiency Measures: Net Zero Buildings

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) for his comprehensive assessment of the issue.

I wish to make a couple of points during my equally short contribution. It is worth reflecting that building regulations first included energy conservation as long ago as 1972. Since then, year after year, those regulations have been tightened up to achieve much greater energy conservation than before. The problem is that the last substantial upgrade of the regulations to achieve a very good energy conservation outcome was in 2013; there has been no substantial upgrade since that date. That is worrying. Minister, when will the building regulations next be upgraded and what will that include?

In 2015, the long-standing policy of the Cameron Government to achieve zero carbon for new homes was abruptly cancelled. That may seem like a little while ago, but it characterises a lot of the discussion about this issue. I hope the Minister can comment on that in his summing up.

The issue came up during the election campaign. I sat with a company that operates in the sector, in a village where a huge development is taking place. We worked out together how much it would cost to make the houses zero carbon as they were being built, from scratch. We calculated that the total increase in cost would be about £5,000; the total cost of retrofitting the houses was about £25,000. That is a huge difference, and retrofitting also comes with enormous problems—we have already heard about some. The firm I met specialises in alternative heating. Everybody wants a ground pump to be put in to get the best approach to heating, but that is not possible in many houses and is not the best solution. Other options, such as biomass boilers, should be considered, as we move forward.

We need to address this area in more detail, because there are significant opportunities for the UK. Residential and commercial buildings account for 60% of electricity consumption in the world today—a phenomenal amount. I have two points to make about that. First, there has been a lot of talk about increasing the ability of district councils to introduce regulations on net zero carbon. That is missing a trick. I invented neighbourhood plans that have gone out of their way to give communities the freedom to decide lots of important things about where housing should go. They have to work within a strategic framework that is set by the district council, but many neighbourhood plans are trying to achieve more than the district council wants. This is an opportunity to give them the freedom to take that forward.

My second point is about developing countries. Whether you support Brexit or not, we are a global player and we need to ensure that what we do helps in developing countries. Many such countries have a housing crisis—we must recognise that. Whatever we do there will have to involve sophisticated commercial financial options. Our international aid budget should reflect that, as well as the opportunities for British companies; many of the existing programmes will not sit very easily within that framework. Throughout my time as trade envoy to Nigeria, I have tried to encourage solar energy there, but the translation of that into better housing is quite a long way away. There is a lot that we can do to help that process.

The building in Africa that stands out as the best net zero example of its type is the Belgian embassy being built in Morocco. When that is the situation in a developing continent, we have to ask why, and what we can do about it.