Climate change and new housing

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/main.jhtml?xml=/property/2005/07/16/peco
16.xml&s***=/property/2005/07/16/ixptop12.html

Like most towns in the South-East, Whitstable in Kent has dozens of new
houses currently rising on its outskirts - characterless brick boxes in a
nondescript, period pastiche. These new homes are just a tiny fraction of
the 150,000 being built each year, themselves a fraction of the two million
that the Government says need to be built by 2016 to tackle the impending
housing crisis.

This spring, Whitstable received nearly two inches of unseasonal snow
overnight. By mid-afternoon the following day, the town's older houses,
built in the 1920s and 1930s, still had thick coverings of snow on their
roofs; the new ones, however, were glistening and grey again, the snow
having been melted by the heat escaping from within.

In theory, these new houses should be far more efficient than the inter-war
ones, built before planning and building regulations, particularly given all
we know now about climate change, carbon dioxide emissions and the benefits
of insulation.

But in practice, a combination of lax inspection systems and a powerful
building industry keen to protect its enormous profits has meant that new
homes built in Britain, with fast construction methods and mass-produced,
environmentally unsound materials, are falling way behind the rest of Europe
in standards of energy efficiency.

To make the problem worse, the Whitstable new-builds, like many new estates,
are a mile and a half from the town centre and railway station, meaning that
their owners will be car-dependent. And their lack of chimneys will make the
occupants totally reliant on fossil fuels at a time of rising energy costs.
So how will their occupants cope with the problems arising out of climate
change and the inevitable fuel crises that lie ahead?

It is a timely question, particularly in the light of last week's G8 meeting
of world leaders, which underlined the gravity of the situation regarding
global warming.

According to a report published recently by the House of Commons
Environmental Audit Committee, unless the way our new houses are built
changes soon, by 2050 the housing sector will be responsible for more than
55 per cent of the UK's entire target for carbon emissions. Already we are
on course to miss our target to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent by
the year 2010.



.