We were supposed to fix houses, not ruin them

In 2019 when we sat down to research and write down our Common Home Plan - the world’s first and still only fully-costed, national scale Green New Deal blueprint - we focused on a distinction when looking at the scale of the problems facing us between “difficult” problems and “hard” problems.

“Difficult” problems are technically challenging. Developing the technology to store enough energy generated by renewable sources to last us through the gaps when demand is high but the wind and sun are low is a “difficult” problem - though one that has been tackled in the years since with major breakthroughs in things like batteries, heat stores and even things like liquid air (to pick three bits of tech news from just this week alone).

“Hard” problems are ones where we already have the technology to fix it, but the scale of the solution is vast and that itself represents the real challenge. “Insulate every house so that we eliminate fuel poverty, reduce energy use and given everyone a comfortable home” is a “hard” problem. It’s probably the largest single problem in our entire blueprint because basically no-one’s house either meets the standards we need at the moment or is ready to sustain comfortable living under the climate emergency if we don’t do anything about it.

It’s also a problem that we now see that the UK Government is utterly failing to tackle.

News broke this week of a massive scandal within the schemes set up by the UK Government to support the retrofitting of homes. Specifically, of the 23,000 homes that received external insulation cladding under the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) and the Great British Insulation Scheme (GBIS), almost all of them have since reported damp, mould, rot and other issues that will require the insulation to be replaced and, in many cases, will necessitate substantial repairs to those homes.

This was a scandal that was easily foreseen - in fact, we predicted it would happen in our Common Home Plan.

Three things have conspired to create the problem. First is that the EPC system we use to measure energy efficiency is insufficient and does not take into account the real-world impact of insulation (see our guest magazine article recently from a supporter who made energy efficiency improvements to their house and found their EPC rating had gone DOWN) - this results in materials being installed that might game the numbers on the EPC but don’t improve the house.

The second is that retrofitting schemes don’t properly survey the house ahead of time to assess which improvements would be best to install or even if the house is in a fit state of repair to accept those improvements. This has led to the bulk of the problems with the cladding where insulation installed over critical air vents has “improved” airtightness in houses that were never designed to be airtight - leading to damp and mould conditions.

The third is that inadequate training and almost completely absent levels of inspection and enforced compliance with standards has led to houses having their insulation installed badly, leading to water ingress behind the cladding, for example, that again leads to mould and rot.

Our own plan for housing retrofits demands that it isn’t done via a series of ad hoc programmes or, worse, simply telling homeowners they must arrange improvements themselves, but by declaring this problem to be one of public works infrastructure to be undertaken collectively. A National Housing Company, working with a Scottish National Infrastructure Company and the Scottish National Investment Bank would start by assessing every home in Scotland to work out what type and level of insulation would best suit that house along with any repairs that might be needed. Plans would then be drawn up on a street-by-street basis and all of the retrofits installed in one batch leverage the economies of scale to bring the overall cost down. This level of planning brings additional efficiencies as it allows for homes to better plan other retrofits like heating (if you install a new heat pump before you retrofit your insulation, you’ll end up with a heat pump that is too large for your newly insulated house). Inspections and compliance will also be mandated to ensure that everything is installed correctly or that defects are addressed before they cause problems.

We can no longer treat fixing the hardest problem in the climate emergency like it’s just a matter of telling people to redecorate their kitchens. We must start treating it like the public infrastructure that it really is. This problem is not difficult. We know what the solutions are. We just need to make them happen.