New toolkit shows warm buildings are achieved by reducing heat loss
Yesterday the Scottish Government scrapped plans to move Scotland to low-carbon heating. Common Weal broadly welcomes the loss of this legislation since it took the wrong approach by forcing individual households to take expensive action on an individual basis rather than addressing the problem through collective, cost-efficient action.
Today a consortia of academics and campaigners have launched a toolkit that outlines how we should be approaching this problem. About 40 per cent of the heat used to heat buildings in Scotland is quickly lost through drafts and poor insulation. This is where 'green heating' begins – by retaining the heat that is put into the building.
We simply shouldn't have been building new houses that were not at or close to passive house standard – a different piece of government legislation is addressing that issue now but its provisions are gradually being chipped away by building industry lobbyists. Yet getting new houses right should be the easy part; retrofitting old houses and particularly old tenements is the hard part.
That's what this new toolkit does. It provides a guide on how to tackle energy efficiency in those older houses. It is designed for factors and other commercial owners of properties and orders actions in precisely the same way Common Weal has proposed – by starting with big wins like draft proofing, proper roof insulation and replacing heat-leaking windows.
This is the systematic approach Scotland will require if we are ever to make a dent on our extensive housing-related carbon emissions – but while information support for commercial owners of housing is great, it is a coordinated, universal public approach which is needed. Common Weal has outlined how that can be done and paid for in our book The Common Home Plan.