We need a 20-year national retrofit plan, Labour peer tells AJ Retrofit Live

Speaking in the keynote slot yesterday (11 September) at the Brewery in the City of London, Young urged Keir Starmer’s government to insulate 20 million existing homes.

Pointing to houses with the lowest EPC energy ratings, she told the day-long conference that a national retrofit plan would contribute to the government’s progress towards achieving net zero by 2050 and other goals.

‘What we need is a 20-year plan for the UK’s 20 million homes that still need to be retrofitted,’ she said. ‘We need collaboration. We need long-term financing mechanisms. We need clear standards of training and an accreditation scheme [and] we need all the tools in the box [for] 2030, and 2050, [because] net zero can't be achieved without backing long-scale retrofitting.’

According to the UK Green Building Council, Britain has 19 million homes with EPC ratings of D which, if retrofitted to EPC rating C, could reduce the country’s demand for gas by a fifth. Still, the new government does not have any national retrofitting policy.

Young, who served as chief executive of the Environment Agency from 2000 to 2008, said retrofit was ‘a fight for boldness, for persistence, for flair’. And she argued that Labour could circumnavigate the embodied carbon problem associated with mass house-building by running it in tandem with a national retrofit plan.

She told AJ Retrofit Live: ‘I think there’s a whole load of issues to do with climate change adaptation. We’re still building houses that flood; we don't need to … [but] I’m pretty certain that it’s impossible to do the cross-government join-up thing and the delivery thing without coming to the conclusion of a radical rethink.’

And she predicted that the Starmer government would provide the ‘long-term certainty’ and ‘long-term direction’ around investment in retrofit.

‘There’s been a huge reluctance by governments of the past to do major public promotions and to use modern marketing techniques to get commitment to ideas like this,’ she said.

‘If I had a pound for every time a minister in front of one of my select committees has said, “well, of course, the information’s on the website”. What sort of world do they live in if they think that everybody is trolling websites every day – particularly people who have not thought of commitment to this agenda? Its crazy.’

She added: ‘George Osborne is my least favorite ever British politician for what he did to [the UK’s zero carbon buildings policy], because when he cancelled it at the last minute, he condemned us to a million and a half houses that are only recently built but will require retrofit. So that’s that issue I was trying to get over of clear plan, medium to long-term certainty, clearly flexibility and adaptability, but not not stop-start and not wandering off.’

Young also said reforming the planning system would not be enough to transform housing delivery in the UK.

'It's not the planning system that is the problem, it's the volume housebuilders,' she said.

Elsewhere at AJ Retrofit Live, academic and environmental activist Duncan Baker Brown spoke on the innovation potential that retrofitting brings to the built environment industry, pointing to the dozens of international case studies detailed in his book The Reuse Atlas.