WEDNESDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2004

PROFESSOR SandY HALLIDAY, MS LYNNE SULLIVAN and PROFESSOR TADJ ORESZCZYN

  Q180  Lord Wade of Chorlton: You would need to know that to make comparisons, I would have thought.

  Professor Halliday: The comparison that I was trying to make is with what is possible because a lot of the reluctance to regulate in these areas seems to be concerned with what is possible and what people will accept. It is very much to do with political will. Therefore, I think the information I do have is valid in the sense that it sets the precedent for what is at least possible within Europe. I take your criticism that more information is always better than less. I think that in itself makes it reasonably valid.

  Professor Oreszczyn: I agree that there is a lot you can carry on doing to the existing stock. I feel it is perhaps important to think about the reason why we are having to default to the regulations as the mechanism for doing that, because this is about the barriers to implementing measures that occur if you do not do it through the regulations. There I think the biggest barrier is cheap energy. At the moment, we spend less on energy than on alcohol. You could heat probably 200 homes for one minute for the cost of running a mobile phone for one minute. Energy is cheap. It would be very difficult to motivate people just on the cost basis. The hassle factor of doing anything in your house and the difficulty about getting good people to come in and do repairs, modifications or refurbishment makes it very difficult to try to motivate people to do things to their own buildings, without resorting to the regulations. When people are personally motivated to improve the energy efficiency of the stock, they do the things mostly that give them comfort: improvements or some other benefit than just energy saving. The most cost-effective measure to do with your house is to put in double glazing. That is the one thing that lots of people have done. They have not really done that so much for energy as for comfort, security and acoustic reasons. They take a lot of the benefits not as energy savings but as improvements in comfort. The regulations tackle the problem in a slightly different way.

  Q181  Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I wonder whether you would like to make any comment about the differences between domestic, public and commercial buildings in their approaches to energy use. Perhaps you can give us some examples of how techniques are transferred between sectors? May I come in quickly on the skills issue because it does seem to me that there is an issue about training people in Britain. I am fully aware of this as I have been working quite closely with the heating and ventilating engineering people and I know all about the skills shortages there. One of the issues is about inspectors. We have to upgrade the skills of the inspectors and a lot of training needs to be done at that level as well, I would have thought. To return to the question I put to you, it is about differences between domestic, public and commercial buildings.

  Professor Oreszczyn: I think there is a dramatic difference between those. Similar techniques are used across the various sectors. For instance, water heating might be 60 per cent of a dwelling's fuel costs, whereas it may be 10 to 30 per cent of an office. What gives you the best results in various buildings compared to dwellings will be radically different. In addition to that, obviously there are leasing arrangements that exist in buildings. In many non-domestic buildings the tenant does not necessarily directly control the energy supply coming into the building and is not necessarily directly influenced by that in a way that domestic owners are. Our understanding of the domestic stock is relatively good. I am not sure to what extent in Germany they really know the distribution of their stock. Even in the UK our housing stock knowledge is very good but for non-domestic stock it is probably 20 years behind that. For instance, we must make reasonably good guesses just to know the number of cavities in the non-domestic sector and the impact that would have on energy consumption. One of the projects we are currently running, which is funded by the Carbon Trust and EPSRC, is to try and collect more information, to get a better understanding of the non-domestic stock. Another point I would like to make on that is that we do not at the moment have a UK energy, non-domestic rating system. We have had the SAP in housing and that has had quite a good impact in enabling people to understand what sort of energy performance they are buying when they get a building and to specify higher standards. We have not had a non-domestic system. I think it is a bit ironic that we might be looking at software from abroad to implement a system in the UK. Again, that shows the problems you end up with if you do not try to keep up-at the forefront of this technology. In the past, we have been lagging behind. There are real advantages to being at the forefront of this. We can lead Europe in many of these respects, and there will be advantages to the industry in being at the forefront of it.

  Q182  Lord Wade of Chorlton: We are informed that climate change will result in a warmer climate for the United Kingdom. Clearly, we may then reach a situation where we are more concerned about cooling our houses than we are about warming them. How can this potential demand for a different kind of energy be reduced? Given the long lifetimes we expect property to last, as it has to do to cover its cost, what should we be doing now not just to look at the present problem but also at the problem in 30, 40 or 50 years' time?

  Ms Sullivan: I was going to make a similar response to the last question. What is really interesting to me as a designer is that the lessons that you learn in designing well a low energy commercial building are to make the actual fabric and the passive aspects of the building very sound. For instance, you shade to stop the summer sun coming in. You try to have exposed thermal mass basically to act as a heat store when you get a lot of radiation and heat that could build up in the day. You ensure that you have correct ventilation levels for health and you make sure that you can expel hot air when you get a build-up. Curiously, those issues have not really been thought through that well for domestic buildings, partly because historically building physics and engineering has not really been applied to domestic properties. I have seen some evidence from research projects carried out on this very subject about the potential for a sudden switch to air conditioning in housing. That suggests to me that we need to address those very basic, passive issues to secure our housing stock and make sure it works passively so that we can absolutely minimise the demand for air conditioning where we get excessive heat build up.

  Professor Oreszczyn: I think we should plan for both warmer and colder future climates. What we should secure are robust designs that can cope with the change in climate whichever way it goes in the future.

  Q183  Lord Wade of Chorlton: That would result from the passive approach to creating the right building materials to create houses which are immune to changes in temperature, either way, as it were?

  Professor Oreszczyn: That is right.

  Ms Sullivan: Thermal stability is possible.

  Q184  Baroness Platt of Writtle: How can the public and businesses be better informed about the full life-cycle energy cost of buildings they buy, and encouraged to use this information when considering a purchase? I should think at the moment that does not enter into it.

  Professor Halliday: I do not think it works like that. I cannot see a situation, without a very radical increase in energy costs, where people will start to make those decisions. We have seen examples in the past. I think the classic example is the increase in the cost of petrol in the States. It went up by a factor of four and consumption went down by about 10 per cent or something. People do not make decisions on that basis. As Professor Oreszczyn has said, we spend much more on drink, on our mobile phones and on other things. I think the responsibility is two-fold: one, to generate if possible a culture shift so that people respect why we will do this, why it is important to individuals, to communities to UK plc in the long term that we take these issues seriously; and, secondly, to place perhaps some requirements on this very complex energy supply industry to do much more in terms of delivering energy efficiency. I do not think we have been very imaginative about that yet. We are funding renewable obligations but we are not looking very seriously at opportunities for what I would call "negawatts".

  Q185  Baroness Platt of Writtle: How do you suggest we could alter the culture so people are thinking in terms of "negawatts"?

  Professor Halliday: That is a very difficult question. Could I have notice of it? I think we have to do it. I will not answer that on the hoof. I will send you a short note on it.

  Q186  Lord Oxburgh: I do not think your petrol analogy is realistic because there is total inelasticity in that market. You have no choice; if you want to drive your car, you buy petrol. A better comparison is in domestic appliances where you do have ratings and people can compare. Although they may not be able to make a direct financial translation, they will say that an A is better than a B. If you had some such rating for houses, I think you might find it began to have an effect. Do you not agree with me?

  Professor Halliday: I would stick to my initial point. I think we can have small effects by ratings. I still feel that people do not fundamentally make decisions on energy on the basis of the cost, unless it is radically more expensive. They may make minor changes possibly, but I do not see there being fundamental changes, except possibly in the higher echelons of the commercial building market where people are making decisions on the basis of energy. Even there, that is directly related to productivity, and the energy costs will be irrelevant compared to the increase in productivity. If they can make them marry up, they will, but, if they are in conflict, they will not: they will use the energy.

  Q187  Chairman: On that rather gloomy note, I am afraid we have run out of time. It is a point that has been made to us quite forcibly and I think we are very seized of it. We have left out some questions that you have been given prior notice of. If you would like to give us any thoughts on those in writing we would be very grateful indeed and it will be published along with the oral answers you have given us today and, indeed, if anything else occurs to you over the new few weeks that you wish you had said but did not do, we would be delighted to receive that. I saw you looking puzzled, the supplementary question we were going to ask was about PFI schemes, had they been a beneficial contribution or otherwise?

  Professor Halliday: We would like that one.

  Q188  Lord Young of Graffham: Energy efficiency.

  Professor Halliday: I appreciate that.

  Q189  Chairman: Can we thank all three of you very much and thank you for the way you have harmonised so beautifully without having practised working together previously, presumably. It has been extremely useful to have the three of you with your slightly different points of views answering our questions.

  Professor Halliday: Thank you for the invitation. I hope that it was helpful.