Britain’s housing directly contributes towards 15 per cent of the UK’s emissions, according to a report from the building society Nationwide, and we will need to decarbonise two homes every minute if we are to meet our climate obligations.
Yet more than one in four homeowners (28 per cent) told a recent survey they have no plans to make any eco-upgrades in the next ten years. The cost of carrying out works were the main concern for two thirds of respondents to a poll of 3,000 UK homeowners carried out last month by NatWest banking group and IHS Markit.
How we persuade homeowners to join the green revolution is a conundrum for lenders as well as the government. The latter has already banned landlords from letting out properties with an energy performance certificate rating below E. After a new Whitehall report, lenders may also be forced to track and annually reveal the EPC rating of the properties they lend against and consider ratings as part of their lending criteria, which means non-energy-efficient homes could become unmortgageable or unsellable. Even so, EPC rating was the third least important factor to consumers when buying a property, according to the NatWest survey.
Lloyd Cochrane, the head of mortgages at NatWest, said: “I can see the EPC becoming something consumers start to care more about because it’s likely to be the measure that we use and the government uses to offer discounts on mortgage products.”
Last week NatWest announced that it has teamed up with British Gas, the housing charity Shelter and the boiler manufacturer Worcester Bosch to create the Sustainable Homes and Buildings Coalition, a new industry policy and public education group.
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Homeowners already think they are doing enough, however, as 60 per cent of those surveyed by the charity Nesta do not think their energy use at home has much effect on emissions. People think the small things they are already doing — switching to low-energy lightbulbs, recycling and turning off lights — are the most effective, when heating accounts for the vast majority of emissions. This means installing costly new systems ground source heat pumps, rather than not rinsing plates before putting them in the dishwasher, a “micro-step” to solve climate change suggested last week to much bafflement by Boris Johnson’s COP26 advisor Allegra Stratton.
Complexity is just as offputting as cost. Nearly one in five (18 per cent) Britons surveyed by Nationwide said they wouldn’t know how to go about making their home more eco-friendly. Even more surprising, government research carried out in 2020 shows that 61 per cent of homeowners had never heard of ground source heat pumps and even more (88 per cent) did not know about hydrogen boilers.
Overcomplication was one of the reasons that the government’s Green Homes Grant scheme failed, according to Nationwide’s report: “Both consumers and builders struggled to get to grips with the complexities of the scheme and it was abandoned after just six months.”
Amid talks of coronavirus vaccination passports, there could be building renovation passports too, suggests Jessica Levy, the director of communications at the Federation of Master Builders, “which sets out clearly what needs to be done on each home to make energy-efficiency improvements”.
Once it has been clearly established what needs to be done, a compromise on who bears the cost seems to be the only way to convince homeowners to go green.
