Government plans to build 300,000 homes a year would overshoot England’s entire share of carbon emissions under climate commitments, new analysis has concluded.
It warns that if Conservatives continue with their 2019 manifesto pledge to build hundreds of thousands of home a year to relieve the housing crisis, England would eat up 104% of its carbon budget by 2050.
A country’s carbon budget is its national fair share of emissions it can release if the world is to achieve the widely accepted goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
“You can’t just go on building new infrastructure forever,” said lead author Dr Sophus zu Ermgassen, a researcher at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at Kent University.
Doing so has an “inherent material and carbon footprint”, he added.
‘Overconsumption by wealth groups’
Instead, dramatically retrofitting existing houses and clamping down on second homes and investment properties would tackle the housing crisis whilst emitting far less pollution, the paper argues.
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It investigates the lack of affordable housing and suggests the problem may be “less with the total supply of housing units and more with their distribution across the population and ‘overconsumption’ by wealthier groups”.
A staggering 92% of England’s carbon budget is set to be used up by the existing housing stock alone via heat and electricity use, if current retrofit plans remain unchanged.
That’s largely because the UK’s homes are some of the biggest energy-wasters in Europe, being poorly insulated and many very old.
The remaining 12% would be spent on constructing and operating the new homes, explained Dr zu Ermgassen.
“There are ways we can house more people with the existing housing stock if we distribute that housing space more equitably,” he told Sky News.
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But the focus of his paper is “not on reducing house building, it’s on how can we meet everyone’s needs but with little environmental impact,” he insisted.
His research calculated England has 41 square metres of housing space available per person on average, “yet that space is very unequally distributed,” he said.
Tax reforms akin to those in other places with high house prices, such as Singapore or Vancouver, would discourage second or empty home-owning and free up stock to provide more people with homes, without relying on rapid building.
Political challenge
Dr zu Ermgassen “completely acknowledge[d]” the “enormous political challenge” of such reforms, including the political power of homeowners, impacts on employment and the financial sector.
“Nevertheless, political and economic barriers… cannot hide that more equitable use of housing is likely necessary to meet England’s unmet housing need without transgressing national sustainability objectives,” the paper argued.
But the “number one most important thing you can do for reducing emissions is to retrofit homes”, said Dr Sophus zu Ermgassen.
Richard Miller, a decarbonisation consultant who spent almost a decade at the government agency Innovate UK, said if the question is “‘can we decarbonise residential built environment?’, then the answer is ‘yes, we can’.”
But the policies and funding are missing, he added, meaning industry lacks incentives and homeowners face high upfront costs.
Mr Miller said policies in the Netherlands have helped ramp up energy efficiency in homes and bring down prices.
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