Chris Huhne pops in!

The Minister for Energy and Climate Change - Chris Huhne - visited the house this morning. With the Green Deal launching next year, the tour was part of the Minister’s ongoing fact-finding into low energy housing.

He seemed to be impressed by the technical work we have done, as well as the finished product. However, quite understandably, his main concern was in respect of the scalability of a project of this complexity.

The UK needs to significantly reduce the energy consumption of its existing stock if we are to meet our carbon targets and reduce dependence on imported heating fuel. In our view, “deep retrofit” of much of the housing stock - like what we have done here - must happen in order to meet these objectives. Anything less will mean either missing our targets and/or just re-visiting the same properties in the future, which is expensive and doubly-disruptive.

Even after this morning’s visit, we are still worried about the degree of standardisation proposed in the Green Deal and are still trying to work out how it will deliver the level of investment required to make these deep retrofits happen.

Photo, left to right: Edward Borgstein, Akta Raja, Chris Huhne, Tom Pakenham