C O N T E X T 1 4 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 7 13 JOHN PRESTON The government, the industry and green retrofit Each Home Counts, the report of the Bonfield Review, focused on the right questions but its total blindness to traditional buildings means that it is fundamentally flawed. Government retrofit schemes started in 2000, with the Treasury-funded Warm Front scheme, focused on fuel poverty. Subsequent schemes, including the Green Deal and ECO (Energy Company Obligation), have been funded by billpayers of the Big Six energy companies, through the so-called ‘green taxes’. The current government has pledged to achieve a million ‘low-cost retrofits’ by 2020, funded through the next stages of ECO. Many see this programme as far too unambitious in relation to 2050 Climate Change Act targets, with demands for retrofit to be made a national infrastructure priority1. But, as the SPAB has warned, a rush to retrofit could lead to severe defects in older buildings and health problems for their occupants2. ECO, unlike the Green Deal, has no safeguards for traditional buildings. Following the withdrawal of Green Deal funding in July 2015, the DECC and DCLGministers Amber Rudd and Greg Clark commissioned Peter Bonfield to lead an Independent Review of Consumer Advice, Protection, Standards and Enforcement for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.The Each Home Counts report was published for consultation in December 2016 at www. eachhomecounts.com/about/3: its newsletters show how the review was racing to implementation without waiting for feedback. This extreme haste, driven by political timescales, would have been worrying at the best of times. The government compounded the problem by devolving responsibility to industry, in effect to existing industry bodies plus independent bodies representing consumers.The ministerial foreword by Baroness Neville-Rolfe (now at theTreasury, for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) and Gavin Barwell MP (housing and planning minister, for the DCLG) welcomes the review ‘as offering a clear and tangible way forward, led by industry itself’. The ministerial foreword claims that the review ‘has been highly active in consulting a diverse range of stakeholders’. That statement was, and remains, dangerously wrong. The review was chaired by an industry insider (Bonfield is CEO of the Building Research Establishment), and its working and implementation groups were and are recruited from and led by industry insiders. While the review process forced the industry to confront consumer protection issues, there was no independent external review of the construction aspects. The review was neither a formal government consultation nor an open call for evidence (unlike the Hansford Review4 for the Green Construction Board). The process was so opaque that it was extremely difficult for even external bodies (including the IHBC) aware of the review to engage with it. The National Trust was not invited, even though it had carried out highly relevant research on its 5,000 privately rented properties. Efforts to find out the membership of the working and implementation groups were stonewalled: this ‘independent’ review is outwith the government’s Code of Practice for Consultations. The review’s workstreams were made up of and chaired by invited industry representatives: consumer protection (chaired by Citizens Advice); advice and guidance (Energy SavingTrust); quality and standards (BSI), skills and training (Trustmark); compliance and enforcement (BBA), holistic property consideration From a simpler era of energy use: a Grade II listed, 19th-century electricity substation in Wimbledon, south London, made by the British Electric Transformer company References 1 For example ‘A housing stock fit for the future’, UK Green Building Council, February 2017, www.ukgbc.org/resources/ publication/housingstock-fit-future-makinghome-energy-efficiencynational-infrastructure 2 ‘Rush to insulate 25 million homes by 2050 would create a time bomb for old buildings’, SPAB press release, 28 February 2017 3 The IHBC’s response is at http://ihbconline.co.uk/ newsarchive/?p=14854 4 www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/ system/uploads/ attachment_data/ file/476977/BIS-15-562solid-wall-insulationreport.pdf
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