There have been a few stories on the BBC this week about eco-villages and green housing that I’ve been meaning to post about, but a nasty cold and jetlag got the better of me til now.
In the first story, a report from a group of MPs says that the government is focusing too much on making new builds environmentally friendly, and in doing so is neglecting existing houses, about 25 million homes. The government, of course, has suggested that bureaucracy will do the job: “The committee also proposes that energy performance certificates, contained in Home Information Packs (HIPs), be required for homeowners seeking planning permission.” Yeah, right.
In the second story, a shortlist of 15 locations for potential eco-towns was revealed by the Government. Over the next six months, the shortlist will be whittled down to ten sites, with half of the proposed towns to be built by 2016, the rest by 2020. The idea is to tackle the national housing shortage in a sustainable manner, with houses being “low-energy, carbon-neutral developments built from recycled materials”.
Forty sites were rejected, because they were mainly “on greenbelt land, threatened wildlife or were similar to projects previously denied planning permission”, and there’s been a fair bit of opposition to submissions from local people. Precise details of the design aren’t mentioned in the BBC articles, so it’s hard to know just how green these houses are going to be, or how well planned the towns. My natural scepticism leads me to believe we’ll end up with something mediocre that could be been done so much better, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.
And, finally, a report from the The National House-Building Council (NHBC) Foundation says that most home-owners aren’t willing to take the steps necessary to turn their houses into ‘zero-carbon’ homes. It found that:
[E]nergy efficiency was not a major factor when it came to choosing a new home. Instead [...] most respondents would prefer a better kitchen or bathroom.
Quelle surprise. Whilst cutting carbon emissions and building environmentally friendly houses is seen as being too expensive and involving too much sacrifice, of course people won’t want to do it. Few people do stuff because they ‘ought to’, but prefer to do things because they want to or because they benefit from them. The stick is not as effective as a carrot.
With a big credit crunch happening, though, perhaps now is a good time to look at how making houses environmentally friendly could add value to them. If we had a little more focus on that, and a bit less on paperwork and soundbite-laden schemes perhaps we could make some headway.
