Climate Jury Session Five

Preston People's Climate Jury Session 5 - Housing

The fifth session of the Preston People's Climate Jury, covered the topic of housing.

Eirian Molloy, Assistant Director for Housing Standards and Improvement at Preston City Council

Improving the energy efficiency of existing homes in Preston

Eirian explained the crucial role that housing improvements play in reducing carbon emissions as our homes account for nearly a quarter of all UK emissions.

Improving energy efficiency is key, especially in a city like Preston where many of the 68,000 residential dwellings are over a hundred years' old and rates of deprivation are higher than in many other parts of England.

It's a huge challenge as many homeowners can't afford to pay for improvements and private tenants have to rely on their landlords. But the benefits of taking action extend beyond emissions' reduction: cold homes make people unwell and children living in cold homes do less well in school, so tackling the problem is good for many reasons.

Preston City Council has worked hard to bid for funding from energy companies and central government to undertake energy efficiency improvements in lower income households, although in the last few years the funding available has been much less. Improvements are often referred to as 'retrofitting' and can include:

• insulation
• draught exclusion
• double glazing
• replacing gas central heating with lower carbon technologies like air source heat pumps, as well as installing solar panels and batteries.

To achieve the advantage of working at scale, the council works together with local authorities across Lancashire to commission retrofit through a partnership arrangement called Cosy Homes in Lancashire.

Diane Neville, Principal Planning Officer, Lancaster City Council

Local Planning

Diane is responsible for the Local Plan in Lancaster which contains all the policies which are used by planning officers to consider a planning application.

The Local Plan sets out what should, and should not, happen in developments for the next 20 years. However local authorities are quite restricted in what they can put in their Local Plan because a lot of policies are determined by central government.

Anyone who wants to build must put in a planning application to the local council's planning department.  A planning officer will assess this by consulting with those who will be affected by the application and then make a recommendation about whether the application should be approved.

Councillors on the Planning Committee will then decide whether to accept the recommendation. When planners are considering housing developments, they need to think about housing need including how much affordable housing should be built. However a decision to allocate land to housing doesn't automatically mean that it will be built because it is the housing industry which builds houses, not the council, and private developers might decide it's not profitable for them to do so.

Planning could play a very important role in addressing the climate emergency at the local level by requiring new housing development to include higher energy efficiency standards as well as more on-site renewable energy, biodiversity protection, open and play spaces, flood resilience and designs to encourage more walking and cycling.

However central government doesn't currently allow local authorities the kind of flexibility to do these things, so local planners are unable to make the best possible use of land to tackle the housing crisis and the climate emergency at the same time.

Building new homes to reduce carbon emissions

Susanna Dart, Climate Change Policy Officer, Lancaster City Council

Susanna described how building homes differently can reduce household carbon emissions by 80%. This is not just good for the planet but can save families thousands of pounds each year. For example Lancaster Housing is a Passivhaus development of 40 eco homes.

Each family owns their own home but also has access to shared facilities which include cars, laundry facilities and a food store. Homes are built to use only 15% of the energy required in a standard built home and all the energy used is generated from two local community owned renewable energy schemes. The development is important because it demonstrates to developers and the council that it is possible to significantly reduce the energy use of new housing, providing high quality homes that are cheaper to live in.

Retrofitting Social Housing

Gemma Voaden, Delivery Manager for Retrofit and Renewable Heat, Together Housing

Together Housing is a housing association with 34,000 houses including some in Preston.

Together Housing has a plan to insulate and retrofit all their homes so that they meet the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C standard by 2030. Insulation can be used for floors, internal and external walls and in lofts to reduce the heat demand, but delivering net zero emissions also means getting rid of gas heating.

Retrofit is a big challenge because it means persuading tenants to accept changes in their homes and work with their social landlord to make this possible. The benefits can be experienced quickly, through improved warmth and lower heating bills, and sometimes in the improved appearance of homes, for example after installing external wall insulation. High initial levels of tenant refusal for retrofit have been addressed by demonstrating the very substantial savings available on heating bills by cooperating to allow improvements.