For 21 years, builders in the United Kingdom have been legally bound to construct homes that conserve energy. The building regulations tell them how much insulation they must use, what kind of windows they must fit and how good their draught-proofing will be. Guess how many builders have been prosecuted in that period for non-compliance? None.
There should be only one good reason for this: that they are building houses so well that enforcement is unnecessary. But a study conducted by the Building Research Establishment, looking at just one factor (the rate at which cold air leaks in), found that 43% of the new houses it checked should have been failed by the inspectors. All of them had been passed. In some homes, the requisite amount of insulation had been left in the lofts, but it was still tied up in bales. No one has been prosecuted because no one gives a damn.
In the past, building control officers were employed by the local municipal council. Today builders hire ‘approved inspectors†to certify their houses. If the inspectors are too tough, they won’t be hired again.
Even if the officers wanted to enforce the rules, it is hard to see how they could. They inspect homes only towards the end of construction, when it is too late to see what’s inside the walls. But the biggest problem appears to be their attitude.
Several building control officers who took part in a survey published this month by the Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes said they saw energy efficiency as a ‘trivial†matter and would never dream of withholding a certificate because a house wasn’t properly insulated. They saw their real job as ensuring that houses won’t fall down or catch fire. Poor energy efficiency, some of them said, is ‘not life threateningâ€. Oh really?
In a recent letter to The Independent newspaper, Tadesse Dadi, an Ethiopian relief worker, reported that ‘we have not needed to wait for graphs to prove climate change is hurting us. We have seen it in increasing floods and droughts and decreasing and less predictable rainfall. These disrupted seasonal patterns leave millions at risk of starvation.â€
Last year a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society showed that ‘warm sea surface temperature[s] … in the southern equatorial Indian Ocean produce an anomalous circulation that reduces rainfall†in Ethiopia. The short rains there have ‘fallen off consistently since 1996†as a result.
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, to be published in October, will show that temperatures in Africa are likely to rise about twice as fast as those in the rest of the world.
Back in the UK, Minister for Housing and Planning Yvette Cooper boasted this month that ‘energy efficiency standards are 40% higher than in 2002â€. This is not true. But even if it were, these standards are worthless if builders know they will never be enforced.
Cooper also flourishes her new voluntary ‘code for sustainable homesâ€, which urges builders to go green. More constructively, she wants inspectors to be given more time in which to prosecute. Unfortunately, as the survey shows, they won’t use this time. The officers still have every incentive not to uphold the law.
But I can support the government when it says it wants to ‘simplify and streamline†building regulations. My suggestion is that it reduces them to one sentence: ‘By 2010, no house in this country shall be built with a heating or cooling system.â€
In Germany there are now about 4 000 homes built to the Passivhaus standard. A Passiv-haus is a house without radiators, fan heaters, stoves, air conditioners or any other kind of heating or cooling device. The only heat it requires is produced by sunlight coming through the windows and by the bodies of the people who live there. A study of more than 100 such homes shows they have a mean indoor temperature of 21,4°C during the bitter German winter. That’s 2,4°C warmer than the average British home.
All that distinguishes these from other houses is that they are built properly. They are airtight (the air that enters the house comes through a heat-exchange system) and have no ‘thermal bridges†— material that can conduct heat from the inside of the house to the outside. The windows are matched carefully to the volume of the house. Because they have no active heating systems, they are not much more expensive to build than ordinary houses. A development of 20 homes in Freiburg, with a measured energy saving of 79%, cost only 7% more than a typical building of the same kind.
I fail to see why the Passivhaus cannot become a universal standard. But this standard, like all those the government might propose, will be a waste of time until our building control officers are forced to do their jobs properly. —