24housing Retrofit Campaign - Retrofitting the nation

24housing helps you get to grips with retrofit with our campaign and award for 2010, with a series of exclusive interviews, news and expert advice. To reach set targets, 26 MILLION homes need to be refurbished to near zero carbon by 2050, and we have the support of a whole houseful of serious players in the retrofit arena, all keen to share their knowledge and opinion on the retrofit challenge for social landlords.

This month, Mat Colmer, Head of Housing at the Energy Saving Trust writes exclusively for 24housing.

By 2020 seven million homes will have been significantly improved – fitted with all appropriate insulation measures or with micro-renewable products like solar hot water panels. By 2015 no old home will lack the basic energy efficient measures and from 2016 all new homes will be built to a new zero-carbon standard.

This is the scale of the Government’s ambitions to tackle the third of the UK’s carbon emissions that come from housing. It’s not just a Labour vision: all the major parties are committed to a similarly ambitious agenda to address climate change.

So we’re looking at a complete transformation of housing stock over the next decades. For the house building industry, that’s a lot of work – and a big opportunity. More than ever, it will require builders, architects, housing associations and contractors to work closely to achieve greater levels of energy performance.

Addressing refurbishment
By 2050, two thirds of the homes in the UK will be ones that are standing today. It is clear that refurbishment of our current homes has a larger part to play than newbuild in meeting environmental standards. Therefore, a whole house approach to refurbishment should be considered. It is important to remember that a whole house approach does not necessarily mean installing all measures in one go. It is about future-proofing as much as possible, creating and delivering a long-term plan to address energy efficiency in the dwelling.

Social landlords need to be aware of how energy efficient their homes are and understand how different measures - installed over time – will deliver improvements to their homes energy performance.

The most obvious tool to help deliver this whole house understanding is the Energy Performance Certificate. Recent Energy Saving Trust research showed that people don’t want inefficient homes, with 68% of people saying they would not like to have a home rated F or G. Over half would in fact pay more for an energy efficient home.

Help is at hand
The Energy Saving Trust Housing programme provides social landlords with free technical advice and practical guidance. Whether you are building new homes or carrying out refurbishment work, we can help you achieve maximum levels of energy performance.

We will be publishing a revised guide on sustainable refurbishment, introducing significantly higher levels of performance than previously recommended. This will be available towards the end of this year. To ensure our technical guidance is practical, we also work with partners on real-life refurbishment allowing us to provide practical examples and share lessons learnt along the way.

www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/housing