Climate Change and Social Housing — A Summary of the Challenges

Adam West

These are complicated times for the social housing sector. Most pressing at the moment would seem to be ubiquitous cost of living crisis, driven in no small part by soaring energy costs. For social housing providers, the obvious answer to this is to reduce the amount of energy required to keep homes at a comfortable temperature. There are huge and much publicised efforts to achieve this at present by insulating homes to retain as much heat as possible in the winter months and installing low-energy heating systems to reduce gas and electricity consumption.

As well as reducing overall energy demand, a lower energy housing stock promises to help tackle climate change through the same mechanisms of energy demand reduction. BEIS and ONS tell us that the built environment is, taken as a whole, responsible for 40% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions so reducing energy demand across homes and business premises is essential to slow climate change.

The needs of the present contrast sharply with the likely needs of the future. 2022 has seen record temperatures across the UK, with previous recorded highs exceeded not by fractions of degrees, but by as much as 1.5 degrees. This leap may seem small to the layperson, but it has stunned scientists. There is therefore a very real danger that the efficient housing of today will threaten the health and even lives of its occupants in the near future through overheating, if indeed it does not already. The academic literature contains examples of ‘energy-efficient’ housing developments where dangerously high temperatures have been recorded. Summer cooling may be as essential as winter heating in the years to come.

Thanks to the Welsh Government’s Innovative Housing and Optimised Retrofit Programmes, new models of housing and ways of adapting existing homes are being explored by housing associations across Wales. Modular and volumetric homes, built in factories and delivered to development sites on lorries are being procured with a view to driving economies of scale in the future and hence to normalise faster and higher quality homes for social tenants (although it takes time for methods to be refined and economies realised). Indeed, Coastal Housing is currently working with Daiwa House Modular Europe and Swansea University to achieve the technology’s potential. Existing homes of all ages are being fitted with solar panels and batteries to reduce the energy bills of occupants and Coastal has treated 16 homes in Port Talbot with just these measures, thanks to the Welsh Government’s Optimised Retrofit Programme.

These programmes funded by the public sector are welcome, however the housing associations face challenges beyond the small numbers of homes improved with government money. In order to build new homes, housing associations must borrow funds, secured against their property. That property must also be maintained and the staff who actually provide services must be paid. Housing association rents are regulated by Welsh Government, and housing associations themselves want to keep their rents affordable, therefore raising additional cash to pay for retrofit programme, either through borrowing or charging additional rental income is problematic for social landlords. With these financial constraints, it is impossible to find sufficient budgetary space in between loan repayments, maintenance and staff costs to improve existing stock to the standards and in the timescales being asked of the sector.

With 1.7 million homes in Wales and a drive to net zero emissions by 2050, it is clear that, although the opportunity for jobs and economic development is there, decarbonising all homes in less than 30 years will be difficult. Over 1,000 homes will need to be completed every week in Wales, and the large, skilled workforce needed to complete this work does not exist. The longer retrofit of homes at scale is delayed, the more homes per week will need to be treated which compounds the problem.

While occupants may be preoccupied with the cost of living crisis, convincing them to adapt to new technology within their homes may prove challenging. For example, a traditional gas boiler heats water to 80 degrees and will heat a home relatively quickly. An electric heat pump, which could be the simplest swap for a gas boiler, runs at about 50 degrees and so will not provide instant heat and indeed will need to run for longer. The days of convenient, instant heat may well be over and there is the concomitant challenge of convincing (especially) older and more vulnerable residents to adapt to such changes.

As our society is in a transitional phase towards a greener future, things are changing quickly. This means that decisions must be made now, with costs attached, as to when to jump. Heat pumps may be the answer now and so there is a drive to install them, but as the market for them develops they may become cheaper and more efficient. Alternatively, hydrogen or heat networks may overtake the technology, leaving the risk of redundancy in work already undertaken. It may be the decided that some of our older homes may have to be demolished and replaced, something which has never happened at scale in Wales.

For housing associations, decisions must be made as to which homes to target for these decarbonisation and energy saving programmes. Should works be completed in one go or staged over several years? Doing things at once may save future disruption but doing work in stages will enable more households to realise the benefits more quickly. Should housing associations target works on areas with higher incidences of poverty or on older or poorer performing homes? These are questions to which there are likely no right or wrong answers, however individual landlords will need to provide justification for every decision they make.

Housing associations manage some 10% of homes in Wales and local authorities manage another 6%. It is a strange quirk of UK history coupled with neo-liberal attitudes that we see the built environment as an embodiment of our heritage and a public good, yet the majority of buildings themselves are private property. That latter point limits the power of the state to coerce owners to act and make privately owned buildings more suited to the future. For example, Coastal’s average SAP score is 73.3. The Welsh average is (on 2019 figures) 61. Social rented homes do tend to be more efficient than privately owned homes. It would seem obvious that in order to avoid covering the countryside in solar panels, we should be utilising the millions of acres of redundant roof surface we have and turning that to solar power generation. With buildings in private ownership, this poses a particular challenge. How do government and energy companies persuade homeowners to let them install microgeneration technology on private homes? With Wales having the oldest built housing stock in Europe, what proportion of those homes are structurally capable of bearing the weight of solar panels? Social housing can be the test bed, but with the majority of homes in private ownership, the real challenge lies in scaling up into private housing where the problems of costs, budgets and skills/labour shortages will be played out a million times over.

Adam West is Research Manager at Coastal Housing Group and a doctoral researcher at Cardiff Metropolitan University. His research focuses on sustainability in housing associations.