The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has warned the Government that the impact of its energy efficiency measures in new buildings will be minimal if it continues to ignore the need to refurbish and retrofit existing buildings.

Its formal response to the housing green paper says although it welcomes the plan to make all new homes zero carbon, virtually no homes currently meet that standard and flexilbility is needed in meeting this goal. It wants efforts targeted where the greatest reductions can be made for the least cost and it wants the discrepancy in the Code for Sustainable Homes which demands publicly financed homes meet standards but private ones are merely rated to be removed.

But the Institution points out that new stock only accounts for around 1% of all stock each year.

“We therefore feel very strongly that the impact of these measures will be minimal if the far bigger problem of emissions emanating from existing stock is not adequately tackled, and we are disappointed to see that no new measures have been announced in the green paper to tackle refurbishment and retrofit of existing homes, which would be far more cost effective,” says its response.

It urges concentration on the estimated 6m low income households which cannot keep warm and dry, essentially the buildings built between 1920 and 1970. And it points out that, thanks to statutory requirements on landlords, owner occupiers are the least likely to invest in energy improvement.

To encourage home owners to invest in energy efficiency, it recommends:-
* lower VAT on materials like insulation and low energy bulbs;
* focus funding on cost effective measures like loft and wall insulation;
* financial/fiscal incentives to invest;
* council tax rebates;
* discounted “green” mortgages;
* national and local targets;
* energy companies’ efficiency schemes;
* new regulations.

www.rics.org/NR/rdonlyres/66B8D48A-711B-4676-8666-58DDFEECAD09/0/RICSResponseToHGPF