£170 Million To Be Wasted On “Greener Homes”
August 23, 2021
By Paul Homewood
More waste of taxpayers’ money:
This is the crucial section:
£170 a year for 38,000 homes tots up to a saving of £6.4 million. In what sane world would this justify spending £170 million?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
That also works out at a little over £4000 per property which doesn’t buy much – certainly not “more energy efficient……heating systems”.
Mr Nut Nut PMs insanity is showing.
In any case, the tenants of these properties will NOT be saving £170 a year soon, because the huge increases in electricity costs to pay the wind energy subsidies will soon wipe out any saving.
Where is the depreciation allowance, for renewal of most of these items every ten years or so?
‘38,000 properties’ – that is of the order of magnitude of (1/100,000)th of the housing stock of the planet. Gaia will be so grateful.
Let’s see. A pretty standard council home would be around 1,000 sq ft. If all the rooms were insulated with just 3″ thick insulation per wall it would reduce the house to 9,000 sq ft. 10% space lost.
Should have said, assumes 6 rooms.
The number of rooms doesn’t matter since it’s only the exterior walls that would be insulated. It would depend more on whether the house is mid or end of terrace or detached.
It would also be highly disruptive: radiators and piping repositioned; likewise sockets and switches; carpets/flooring adjusted; fitted cupboards?
Quite right, Mike. My bad.
Typo alert Harry! ” reduce the house to 9,000 sq ft. ” Is this where Doctor Who hangs out?
A zero here or there and soon your working on Buckingham Palace.
Isn’t this how ‘the powers that know f-all’ brought about the cladding disaster?
No, that was the EU regulations at the time which allowed builders to work to a lower specification. (Ref Christopher Booker)
The regulations are the Building Regulations which remain in place unchanged since we left the EU. Building Regulations became an ‘occupied area’ and so control of them passed to the EU and so when the cause of a cladding fire in Lanarkshire in 1999 was known the British Standard was changed to include a ‘cladding system’ fire test there was no power to make this test compulsory under the Building Regulations. The then Labour Government with 2 Jags Prescott as minister and his deputy John ‘the Grenfell Tower builders are murderers’ McDonnell could have taken the case to the EU for the regulations to be amended but they did nothing. (Ref Dr Richard North)
It so happens that Dr North’s revision of the Booker/North must-read EU history The Great Deception is now on sale which covers right up to our exit.
The money would be better spent making houses/flats habitable that have recently been on the news showing them full of mildew with ceilings falling down and flooding over the floors. An absolutley shameful state of affairs. The tenants are at their wits end with nothing being done for years. The owners and councils of those properties should hang their heads in shame. They should rehouse the tenants until they are repaired.
Or the tenants could wash the curtains, clean the rooms, open the windows or even repaint. Lazy sods.
“They should rehouse the tenants until they are repaired.”
Unfortunately, some tenants have already exceeded their design life; but they can be broken up for scrap.
There is rather a lot of promotion of insulation by lots of people with a lot of lucrative work to gain from government largesse at tax payer expense that is simply not required. The Energy Performance Certificate of any property where one has been carried out can be viewed here.
https://find-energy-certificate.digital.communities.gov.uk/
I own 3 rental properties and know lots of other rental owners. Here is an example of a terraced house with solid walls in rather a poor state that actually meets category C
https://find-energy-certificate.digital.communities.gov.uk/energy-certificate/0754-2842-6885-9491-3565
However the recently improved neighbour’s identical property only meets band D
https://find-energy-certificate.digital.communities.gov.uk/energy-certificate/2318-8965-7219-1377-0930
How to improve the latter? Ensure loft insulation is improved, fit thermostatic radiator valves, and change the lightbulbs. As simple as that.
Providing you have a modern condensing boiler (natural gas, LPG or oil fired) that has individually and group control thermostatic systems, loft insulation, double glazing and low energy light bulbs you will almost certainly meet band C regardless of wall insulation.
Here’s a real dig behind the nonsense of EPCs. Worth reading all three parts to understand just how crazy government policy has become.
Thanks for that very detailed report. One of the issues I personally found with the assessors was that they are often very poorly qualified and do not seem to have even basic understanding. The tendency is to just make assumptions rather than actually check. The EPC for my own residence was in band D when I bought it stating “cavity walls no insulation – assumed” Apparently the multiple plugged drill holes in the external walls meant nothing at all. The previous owner did not have his “certificate” available so the EPC was marked down as no insulation. I have since had this corrected, changed the lightbulbs and now the property is is band B!
Rubbish Ray. I have two solid brick properties, with the improvements you suggested, and neither achieve a c rating. One needs wall insulation the other solar panels.
It is not that easy or cheap!
You might get lucky if you simply had the properties re-evaluated by a different assessor. See the write-up at the link to Watt Logic.
To “I don’t believe it” did you not look at those EPCs I referred to? You probably have an EPC inspector who does not understand the system. As I stated I personally own 3 rental properties and prior to this thread I posted that I had recently had them all reassessed to achieve band C within the last six weeks. All of them are solid walled, I suggest you get a different assessor who knows the regulation requirements. I posted hard provable and evidenced fact and certainly not rubbish. One of us is clearly doing things wrong and it is not me.
We recently sold my mother-in-laws house. Had to have a certificate as the family had owned it since new in 1929. Nice lad who provided it, took 5 minutes but he had no clue what, where or why. It’s a pointless box-ticking exercise, not worth a penny.
Indeed, that has been my personal experience as well. The assessors are personable enough but usually completely unqualified box tickers. I have had a grand total of five assessments done in the last two months (my own home, 3 rental properties I own and one I monitored for a friend) and I essentially had to explain to the assessors how to do their job properly. It is completely ridiculous to simply say “assumed” when things are blatantly obvious. I lifted a carpet in one room to show a solid floor as inexplicably the assessor wanted to assume it was timber suspended. They are completely useless as a guide to a building’s energy consumption.
Even the UK.Gov website where some cases are given for upgrading gives examples of the savings with costs (conservative) of £ thousands to save £ 20 – £ 50 ,/ year. Paybacks exceed 40 years in most of the recommended “upgrades” to “save the world”.
People have more sense than to spend small fortunes for no measurable benefit: and even the so-called climate benefits, if they even exist, would be beneath any measurable value.
Sadly we have yet another government where dogma trumps pragmatism and realism.
Simple Payback-Period: 24 years 9 months.
Well at least it’s a bit better than the over 200 year payback on Grenfell Tower cladding. But of course the weasel words are “up to” which suggests that the average payback period will be substantially longer.
Whether they will actually measure real world performance is a rather different issue. Here’s some advice they could usefully follow while treating some of the spending as research.
Thanks for that link, IDAU.
The “The performance gap and poor modelling contribute to the problem” graphic was particularly interesting. [It’s a pity it’s compilers couldn’t afford a spell-checker, especially as the lists of variables are identical, yet simply ranked differently! 😀]
In what sane world would this justify spending £170 million?
To save the planet maybe
Can just 38,000 smallish homes affect the planet?
Not in the real world surely but in the climate world maybe
A world where you are spending OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY!
Where are the parliamentary standards people? These sums are genuinely outrageous.
Where is Dishy Rishi? It’s to be hoped he sees what’s going on here because when he takes over from this deranged PM he’ll be hog-tied financially by Boris and Nut Nut’s) obscene spending.
He needs to reign it in now, otherwise his time as PM will be ruined before it starts.
It might be a cheap way to find out that their insulation plans are in reality utterly inadequate and that the bill for doing it properly is a prohibitive £2 trillion.
We need some new lyrics to Fagin’s song from Oliver!, Renewing the Situation.
I think they better think it out again.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There was a related session on TalkRadio this morning, indicating that the lunatics in councils all over the country are snapping up the money thrown at them, regardless a mandate or of the concept of value-for-money. My own council is in the process of launching its grandiose zero carbon policy, including invoking the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly elimination of poverty! Hypocrisy writ large.
So we get government by the (unelected) UN by the (green) backdoor. Sounds like an Agenda….
Indeed. As the local ‘newspaper’, the Alloa Advertiser, headlined last Wednesday,
.
https://www.alloaadvertiser.com/news/19516094.clacks-council-declare-climate-emergency-week/
Last I understood, AA was owned and operated via Johnston Press, coincidentally too across about two-thirds of UK’s local newspapers with an interesting company history.
@DaveR
I see the Alloa Advertiser is part of the NewQuestUK fleet of lame local rags owned and run by The Gannet Corporation of Fairfax VA who also have a fleet of US military periodicals – strangely, the administrators of the recent Green Homes Grant a certain ICF have their HQ just around the corner….
Coincidence innit?
I saw some brand new social housing flats in Haverhill which were so airtight they had to have electric ventilation pumps running continuously. IIRC one of the lease conditions was that you didn’t own a car.
JF
And they want anyone with a gas boiler to pay a tax on it to fund this sort of stupidity.
If the £4000 per house was the cost in full, payback will be after 25years when ignoring interest rates. But the £ quoted is the subsidy, homeowners are responsible for a lot more. So payback considering interest rates could be longer than a lifetime.
What about the rest of the 25 million homes needing insulation & new windows quoted in 1st March 2017 article I saw above. 100’000 million £ ?
“Or the tenants could wash the curtains, clean the rooms, open the windows or even repaint. Lazy sods.” I don’t think that will stop the ceilings falling down when it rains heavily and the roof leaks.
I climbed up on my roof and fixed my roof leak, but self-help and personal responsibility are alien notions in the UKs dependency culture. Of course i’m a sprightly 63yrs old. Cant expect todays youngsters to climb ladders.
” I climbed up on my roof and fixed my roof leak” I am talking about Housing Association or council blocks of flats and funilly enough, tenants are not allowed to repair the roof,even if they had the ladders or expertise. Home owners can do as they wish, as I do. With rented flats or houses it is the landlords responsibilty to make repairs in good time and thoroughly enough to stop the issue reocurring. Tenants may be single mothers, very old and infirm, perhaps disabled or even able bodied and the landlords have let them down very badly indeed. Spending millions on houses that are in good repair to save the planet is just plain rediculous.
I must believe in the coming climate emergency.
I have seen the IPCC Hockey Stick and it shows we will not need heating in our homes.
So this discussion is pointless.
We look for signs of intelligent life in the rest of the universe, because we were unable to find it on planet earth.
‘Save around ‘£170 ‘ Around? Tell me how the baseline is to be established and how the saving is to be measured. Another lefty socialist nanny state Thing with no maths or pilot behind it. Perhaps those suggesting this scheme should be forced to invest say 1% from their own purse.
What is it with the use of the term “social”?
– Social Housing . . .
– socially rented . . .
– social distancing
The last of these means “physical” as in cm., m., or in the USA 6 feet.
I’ve no idea what the first 2 mean
I think I got it:
In the USA we call it “public” and it means taxes payed for it and a non-responsive agency is in charge of it. In short, there is no real owner that cares about the place.
If the members of the councils that voted for these had to personally go fix leaky toilets they would soon find a better way.
Social housing is a taxpayer-supported housing for sociopaths.
Hydrogen boilers should be known as “Version 2″s, or V2s for short, because of the random gas explosions that will then occur all over the country.
More good news on the windmill front
Wind-Turbine Makers Struggle to Profit From Renewable-Energy Boom
Rising raw-material costs, unpredictable U.S. subsidies and concerns transporting the giant machines are crimping earnings for companies such as Vestas and General Electric
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wind-turbine-makers-struggle-to-profit-from-renewable-energy-boom-11629711002
We keep being told that a large proportion of electricity is renewable in the U.K. Assuming that this is the case, only a small portion of the £170 saving has a carbon footprint. I wonder whether the CO2 released to install this stuff is more than the minuscule saving.
“making their homes warmer”…
Isn’t global warming aka climate change already doing that? ;-p