Retrofit is on a roll, Let’s keep the momentum going

Keith Baker gives us an update on the progress he’s making on helping to improve Scotland’s home energy efficiency standards by having the Scottish Government adopt principles that he and Common Weal have been pushing towards.

As some of you will be aware, and with apologies to members of the Energy Working Group, much of the past two and a half years of my life have been dominated by the development of the Scottish Government’s Heat and Energy Efficiency Technical Suitability Assessment (HEETSA).

There’ll be more official news on HEETSA soon, as we’re now awaiting the publication of the Planning and Discovery Report, on which I’ve been serving as a peer-reviewer. The details of that report are still under wraps but it pays substantial attention to the skills, training, and qualifications that will be needed to deliver on HEETSA’s ambitions – a timely development due to the crises in further and higher education. (Sorry to report that my post is one of those under threat).

We’re not quite creating a new industry from scratch, but we’re not far off.

The key principles and ideas behind HEETSA – putting maintenance first and ensuring all the measures we install are ‘no regrets’ solutions that will future proof our building stock - are things that Common Weal has been arguing for for many years. However, that lack of historical progress has left us with a lot of catching up to do. If we were where we should’ve been by now, many of us would not now be running fans during the day or shelling out on air conditioning units.

Not long after I joined Glasgow Caledonian University in 2010 my then boss and I had a meeting with the Scottish Government where we tried in vain to tell them that tenements in the central belt were already overheating (and he had the data to prove it). Not that they were doing a good job of keeping people warm in winter either, as attested to by the rise in fuel poverty rates during the 2010’s.

And the Scottish House Condition Survey continued to report the numbers of properties in need of substantial repairs, whilst Energy Performance Certificates and other policy mechanisms continued to prioritise energy efficiency measures and slapping on renewable energy technologies. Much of what little funding was available for maintenance came from, and still does come from, Westminster – and the same goes for funding for adult and professional education.

And these two areas of policy are now inseparable. Scotland is generally pretty good at turning school leavers into graduates for the skilled professions - and we need to be doing more of that. But the numbers of professionals we need and the time we need them by dictate that we can’t rely solely on the graduate manufacturing belt. Whilst not diluting what they already do well, further and higher education institutions need to play their part in servicing this demand, and the most effective way for the Scottish Government to do this will be to tell them to do so, and back it with funding.

“And, contrary to what we had assumed, the PassivHaus Bill is still very much alive.”

And HEETSA is just one of a number of related policies with major milestones landing around this summer that could, finally, drastically change the way we design and improve our building stock. We are also expecting the final details of the Scottish Government’s reforms to EPCs; the return of the Heat in Buildings Bill; the next stage of the progress on the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for the Private Rented Sector (PRS MEES); MEES legislation for England and Wales; the release of the new Home Energy Model (the updated and rebranded version of the Standard Assessment Procedure – the model underpinning EPCs), and it’s non-domestic variant; and the English Future Homes Standard.

And, contrary to what we had assumed, the PassivHaus Bill is still very much alive, and (if passed) will add to that demand for skilled professionals.

Suddenly, it’s all to play for.

We will be keeping the pressure up, and you can help. Here’s how.

As part of a group led by the Scottish Ecological Design Association, Common Weal is a co-author and signatory to an open letter to Shirley-Anne Somerville, Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Housing, calling for greater support for retrofit training. The first round of signatories include Historic Environment Scotland, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), and the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RICS), and we are now asking for more organisations and companies to add their names to it.

We also have a petition to the Scottish Parliament that everyone can sign, so please spare us a few minutes to add your name to it.

I’ll be back with more on HEESTA and the other legislation, hopefully sooner rather than later.