Committee on Climate Change’s 2020 Progress Report

Committee on Climate Change’s 2020 Progress Report

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) published their latest progress report to Parliament on the 25th June. Its great to see that retrofit has got the recognition that it deserves and points out that “the major challenge of widespread building renovation and retrofit to increase building heat efficiency has been largely unaddressed”.

The report outlines four medium-term milestones for the Government’s Buildings policy in order for the UK to be on track to net zero emissions by 2050.

Standards

“Review professional standards and skills across the building, heat and ventilation supply trades with a nationwide training programme to upskill the existing workforce”

Lifting the country’s housing stock to EPC band C by 2030 required a 139% rise in the number of people working in the domestic refurbishment sector to cover the additional work (LINK). This is an exciting opportunity for job creation across every region of the UK and RetrofitWorks can play a central role in ensuring that there is a locally driven model available for communitites and local authorities to use as they wish to drive demand and also to create a framework around which local SMEs can thrive.

Performance Monitoring

“Reform monitoring metrics and certification to reflect real world performance, rather than modelled data (e.g. Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP)). Accurate performance testing and reporting must be made widespread, committing developers to the standards they advertise.”

Given that we are strong advocates of good quality work, a key tenet of this is that the performance of every homes has to deliver what was promised. Our angle here is that at the very least, every home should at least have a ‘whole house plan’ before any substantial work is initiated. So much work in his country is carried out with no check back to Building Regulations in the deisng process or on site once completed, nor has it had any kind of energy assessment at all. The more this culture prevails, the harder it will be for us to reach ‘Net Zero’ performance for our homes. Far from moving in the right direction, each home that has ill-considered work carried out actually gives us even more work to do as we have to remove that additional hurdle, with extra expense, to reach our goal.

You can read the full report here.

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