Oral evidence - Built Environment

Members present

Baroness O’Cathain (Chairman)

Baroness Andrews

Lord Clement-Jones

Lord Freeman

Lord Inglewood

Earl of Lytton

Baroness Rawlings

Baroness Young of Old Scone

_______________________

Examination of Witness

Ms Louise Sunderland, Senior Policy Adviser, UK Green Building Council

Q251 The Chairman: Welcome to this evidence session of the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. You have in front of you a list of the interests that have been declared by Members of the Committee. A transcript of the meeting will be taken and published on the Committee website. You will have the opportunity to make corrections, where necessary. Can you just introduce yourself with a small background for the purpose of the transcript?

Louise Sunderland: My name is Louise Sunderland. I am the senior policy adviser for the UK Green Building Council. I specialise in new-build policy in the UK Green Building Council, although we have a large programme of work on the existing building stock. I undertake some work in a freelance capacity working mainly on European energy efficiency delivery and policy.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. What would be the main impacts on sustainable development resulting from the abolition of the zero-carbon homes requirement?

Louise Sunderland: I think a colleague of yours, Lord Deben, put it very well last week when the Committee on Climate Change, which he chairs, launched their report on the fifth carbon budget. He said that with the scrapping of the zero-carbon targets we are in danger of building homes today that will need to be retrofitted tomorrow. I totally agree with that. I would go further and say that we are not in danger; these homes will need to be retrofitted tomorrow. The contribution that will be necessary from the building stock is very clear in the carbon budgets. That is a very large contribution. Our homes will need to be incredibly energy efficient and, unfortunately, the regulated standards that we have today do not get our new homes to that standard for the future. I do not need to explain to the Committee the added difficulty of retrofitting homes when householders are living in them and when a lot of structural decisions have already been made. There are multiple barriers to doing that work at a later stage.

On the ground, we are in real danger of standards going backwards. We have had a situation in the past where, driven by the zero-carbon policy which was announced in 2006-07, we had a very clear trajectory. Local authorities, where they have seen viability and need in their area and where they have been ambitious, have encouraged and required higher standards. Certainly from the UK Green Building Council’s membership’s point of view, there are a lot of housebuilders and developers who have sought to pursue higher standards. That has meant that we have seen quite a lot of developments coming forward. We are talking about some very large numbers of above building regulation standards.

The combination of the scrapping of the zero-carbon policy, on the one hand, and the housing standards review, on the other, which has restricted local authorities’ powers to require higher standards in their planning policies, means there are very few drivers for going above building regulations. Where we have seen collaborative or voluntary action, pushing the standard a little higher, I feel there is very little to continue to drive that. Arguably, that is now prevented, given this combination of the zero-carbon policy going and the housing standards review restricting local authorities’ powers. That means we have gone from building regulations holding the role that regulation should have, which is to bring up the bottom, to a point where building regulations become almost a ceiling, and that is an incredible worry.

The other important point to make is there are very few market drivers for energy efficient homes. So this is an area where regulation is incredibly important. Lots of factors prevent a true and strong signal coming from the market to a housebuilder to illustrate that investment in more sustainable housing will be rewarded, valued and eventually work within their business model.

We have lack of supply, which is incredibly evident, but also lack of choice and larger factors that influence a house buyer’s choice of home—not least school catchment area, access to public transport, those kinds of things—which mean that, even if a house buyer would choose a more efficient home over a less efficient home, we are not seeing those signals because they are being clouded by all these other factors. That is quite bleak. I do not feel I have dressed up that situation at all; it is a fair and accurate analysis of the situation for housing standards.

Perhaps I could say a couple of other things about the broader carbon objectives that will suffer and the industry perspective. From the point of view of broader carbon objectives across the piece, I think everyone will know the zero-carbon standard for homes had within it two major pieces. One was a minimum standard that needed to be delivered in the home, or on the site of the home, through fabric improvements—insulation—and potentially renewable energy. Then between the minimum standard and the full target there was a flexibility element, cognisant of the fact that some sites have restrictions on them. If the stretching standard could not be cost-effectively delivered on one site the offsetting mechanism allowed the costs not to be pushed too high for those particular sites. That allowable solutions mechanism, which was how it was termed, provided a huge potential for a national fund or locally delivered solutions to overcome some of the barriers to delivering other built environment sector solutions. We might be talking about decentralised heat and retrofitting of existing stock, two really big challenges that I think we are yet to tackle effectively.

At the time the Productivity Plan was launched in July, the UK Green Building Council membership had a group in place looking at how the building sector could get most value and most carbon value out of that allowable solutions mechanism. This is another huge piece that has been lost, aside from the individual homes and the minimum standards delivered there. This allowable solutions mechanism was another piece of potential that the building sector was keen to pursue that has been lost through the loss of this standard.

The only other thing to say from the broader perspective is that we did not only have in place a zero-carbon homes standard, but we also had a standard for zero-carbon non-domestic buildings to follow in 2019. We should be clear that that standard has been scrapped as well. The two sister policies sitting together have been got rid of. This does not follow from the justification that was given for the removal of the homes standard, which was about the housing crisis and needing to deliver more homes, more quickly, and reducing regulation. We do not have a non-domestic buildings crisis in the same way as we have a housing crisis. It is very difficult to understand why that target was also scrapped.

Touching on the impact on the industry, we have a housebuilding industry that has spent the last 10 years preparing for this, and they have spent an awful lot of money. Anecdotally, a single member puts the amount of money spent and wasted in the tens of millions. That is a single member. We have 400-odd members just in our membership. The industry is much broader than that.

Lord Inglewood: What do you mean when you say they have spent this money?

Louise Sunderland: That would be on research and development in moving the house designs from delivering previous standards in expectation of delivering the higher new standards. I do not have the figures, unfortunately, but I could look to provide them to the Committee, of the construction products industry, which has to move faster than the housebuilding industry. That industry has to move much earlier with research and development to bring products to the market to offer to the housebuilders to include in their designs, and their investment would be huge.

The Chairman: If you have any other ideas on that particular aspect, could you drop us a note about it?

Louise Sunderland: Yes, I will. The final point is that we are now slightly adrift. In the last 10 years we have had this very clear trajectory and everyone has known where they are going and have had a lot of time to put in place the strategies. Now we do not know where we are going. We do not know when the next update to building regulations might be and, therefore, industry has nothing to place its investment in. Not only have we had wasted investment, but we now have no replacement trajectory. The arguments for repeated investment next time, based on a governmental policy, will be much harder to make.

The Chairman: My final question is: who is making the Government aware of all of this? Are you? Is there a trade association? Is there an institute? Is there anybody who is bringing the cause up and showing them, as you have done to us very clearly, what the problem is?

Louise Sunderland: There are a lot of us trying. The UK Green Building Council has a very long history, particularly with the zero-carbon policy, because we were involved in its origination. The Zero Carbon Hub was set up as a collaboration between industry and government to work out the technical standards. Certainly on the zero-carbon perspective, we have shouted as loud as we can, to be honest with you. With a vast group of other commercial organisations, green groups and membership organisations, we have also made representations to the other Committees in the House of Commons who are looking at similar issues around green growth and the building sector. We have made representations.

Q252 Baroness Andrews: I want to ask a couple of quantifiable questions. In percentage terms, how much do our homes contribute to our carbon emissions?

Louise Sunderland: Off the top of my head I think it is around 22%.

Baroness Andrews: In relation to new homes, can we quantify the increase in our emissions? Can you work that figure out for us?

Louise Sunderland: I am sure the Committee on Climate Change has those figures. I do not have them to hand here, but I could certainly follow up with those.

Baroness Andrews: How much is it going to save developers? What is the economic argument for making this change in terms of development costs of new housing?

Louise Sunderland: The most recent cost analysis of delivering the previously defined zero-carbon standard was done at the beginning of 2014. That looked at the entire cost, both delivering the minimum standard and the cost that might be offset through the allowable solutions mechanism. That came at an average cost of around £3,600 per unit. That is not the minimum or the maximum. Obviously flats being delivered would have an extra over-cost of much lower than that. The important point from that report was that this was the second of these analyses—the first was done in 2011—and they had seen a 50% reduction in those three years in the extra over-cost, so in the extra cost for a developer to deliver this standard.

Baroness Andrews: It had come down 50%.

Louise Sunderland: It had come down 50% in three years. This was two years ago and they projected that the costs would fall hugely. It is also important to say that costs fall with volume. Things become cheaper, products become cheaper and designs and delivery become cheaper when the supply chain is well-oiled and delivering a lot of volume. We saw that 50% reduction in cost when there was not a huge volume of that standard of homes going through.

Some of the major housebuilders were involved in a project, which I can send you information on, AIMC4, where housebuilders came together to look at how they could deliver homes to code level 4 on energy efficiency at the same price as the previous standard. They were confident at the end of that to say they had not delivered those homes at that standard for the same price yet but, with volume, they would.

Baroness Andrews: Have the developers joined with you in telling the Government that this is not cost-effective, or are the developers really pleased that this “burden” has been taken off them?

Louise Sunderland: Obviously I speak for our members, who are members of the UK Green Building Council, which indicates they may be more progressive. I cannot speak for the rest of developers and housebuilders in the country, but from our membership, on which sit some of the biggest housebuilders, there was a complete willingness to deliver this standard. All of the work that was done by the Zero Carbon Hub, which is part funded by NHBC, and had a lot of the major housebuilders on the working groups, delivered a standard they were happy to deliver. They did not sign up to a standard that was impossible.

Q253 Earl of Lytton: I can relate professionally to everything you have said. There are a couple of things I want to ask. Given the high standards of insulation that are required in a zero-carbon home, first, is construction quality an issue? Secondly, because I come across this quite a lot, is there a problem with the user interface in relation to people not understanding how very efficient and highly insulated homes should work, things like people drying their washing in the living room because they do not have another facility to do it, and condensation arises? Are we getting near to cracking some of these problems? I do not know whether there is a particular problem with construction quality among people who are members of your organisation, but I have come across some elsewhere. Is that going to be an issue? Technically, this is a legacy that could damage downstream satisfaction on both counts.

Louise Sunderland: In the UK, we need to improve upon construction quality across the board. I find a slightly artificial differentiation between quality of insulation standards, or sustainability standards, versus build quality, full stop. It has been repeatedly said that we need to improve the building control and checking of our homes. For example—not in domestic buildings—at the moment the UK Green Building Council members are coming together to look at delivering designed performance, ensuring that what we deliver actually does what we design it to do. That is in commercial buildings, but the Zero Carbon Hub has done a very similar piece of work for homes. There is work going on specifically to look at, if we measure a building after it has been constructed and, for some reason, its running cost, carbon impact or kilowatt hour per metre squared is higher than we expected, what are the causes? What are the individual elements that we need to address in the construction process? There is a lot of work going on there.

The first thing I would say on the user interface is that I feel a lot of housebuilders—and this is evidenced by the AIMC4 project that I referenced earlier—would rather deliver high standards through fabric efficiency and efficient systems that a householder is relatively familiar with, a very efficient gas boiler, for example, rather than adding a lot of technologies that, as housebuilders, they may feel are not so attractive in the market. That design approach mitigates against a lot of what you are saying. That is not to say there are a lot of technologies that can work blind. Increasingly, design is going the way that the home should provide an environment that is comfortable without the user having to interact too heavily.

One area that potentially we need to continue to look at and change is air quality and ventilation. There is a lot of work going on at the moment to look at what is the best solution to ventilation: is it mechanical ventilation that the user has to interact with, or can we produce for example passive stack ventilation that people do not have to interact with so much? They are all issues that are being addressed and looked at. Along with the overheating issue, I feel they are issues that, as we push for better standards, we will discover and address as an industry. They are not necessarily issues that should be used to get in the way of still pushing for those higher standards.

Q254 Baroness Young of Old Scone: We have talked a lot about zero carbon. Can we move to some of the other sustainable building standards? I was rather fond of the Code for Sustainable Buildings. How far do you think building regulations have now taken account of standards across the board in relation to sustainable building? How far are there holes that are not being filled?

Louise Sunderland: That is an excellent question. I have already noted that the housing standards review, which was part of the mechanism that got rid of the Code for Sustainable Buildings, to which you are referring, is silent on energy, because it expected energy to be dealt with by the zero-carbon standards. There is a big hole in higher energy standards. What is more, we have gone from the Code for Sustainable Homes, which provided quite a holistic framework. It looked at a number of different building elements: energy and carbon, water, materials, waste, pollution, and health and wellbeing - which increasingly is becoming very important. We have had a few of those issues taken into the new building regulations framework, but there are a lot that are now outstanding. We are particularly worried about daylighting. Previously, daylighting was a design consideration that the Code for Sustainable Homes required a design to look at. That is not now included in building regulations. There is very little to encourage daylighting and sunlighting to be considered in the design of our homes. For me, that is a very important factor, as are indoor air quality and the materials used to build homes. Those are huge omissions that could lead to some very disappointing and potentially quite damaging results, particularly in the area of health and wellbeing. A focus on the sourcing of materials – to consider their embodied impacts, as in the carbon that goes into making them - but also as some materials have the potential to “off-gas” in a home, in an environment where families live and work. A failure to consider materials alongside a failure to adequately address indoor quality and potentially look at daylighting and sunlighting - all those things add up to massive oversights in the new framework that we have. This is something that the UK Green Building Council, as we engaged in the housing standards review, highlighted at the time. The comment we made was that we generally supported the move to nationalisation of standards, as long as building regulations were up to the task. Building regulations need to set out the very strong trajectory of ambition for a lot of these issues—as we had with zero-carbon policy, but have no longer—but also a trajectory of trying to bring in some of these now overlooked issues so that they encourage a more holistic approach to design.

Q255 Lord Freeman: The Government seem determined to reach a target of 200,000 houses being built each year. One can understand that pressure but do you believe that can be achieved consistently with meeting the sustainable design standards which you have talked about? Do you think there is a conflict and, if there is, do you think it can be reconciled, and quickly?

Louise Sunderland: I do not believe there is a conflict; I do not think there needs to be and I have certainly not seen evidence of a conflict. I will back up that position if I may but, before I do so, let me ask: would we ask the same question about the presence of fire regulations? Would we ask the same question about the presence of structural regulations? Would we compromise on some of the health and safety and other important elements of our building regulations to deliver homes? Of course not—I really hope not, but of course we would not. What that illustrates is that we are still seeing sustainability, and particularly the energy and carbon elements of sustainability, as a “nice to have”—as something we are happy to have as long as it does not impact on delivering homes. It is not optional, particularly in the context of this week, with the COP21 negotiations in Paris opening yesterday with statements from world leaders. I noticed there was a consistent message, which was basically that this is the last chance we have. We have been through something like 15 years of these negotiations and we have not really achieved what we need to. That sounds very emotive, but it is important to frame that question in those terms. The impact of not delivering on our carbon targets may not be felt immediately by the family in a home which does not have a smoke alarm and therefore is terribly affected by a fire, but it will be felt by a much larger number of people and by the natural world.

That is the rather emotive bit, but turning to the evidence for why I take the position that there does not need to be this conflict, first, there is no evidence at all to say that the removal of a zero-carbon standard will help any more homes be built. There is an important misconception that we should level. Higher building standards do not lead to higher home costs; they do not exacerbate the affordability crisis. Housebuilders cannot dictate the price they sell their houses for; that is driven by the market. The potential extra cost of delivering a home to a higher standard therefore influences the value of the land and the price the housebuilder can afford to pay for the land. The beauty of regulation is that every housebuilder bidding on that land is affected equally, so we get a situation where it is potentially the land market that has shifted but that does not mean more expensive houses. That is a common misconception.

The second point is that, as I said, the extra price for delivering the zero-carbon standard has been falling drastically. Regulation is, once again, one of the most important drivers for reducing the cost of delivery, because it creates volume in the market and therefore the market and the products in it can respond. The bigger, overarching point is that there are a lot of other barriers preventing the number of homes that you have referred to coming forward. Until we see the removal of those barriers, we will never see the much smaller evidence of the impact of the higher standards. Many recent reports have referenced this, including the Lyons review last year, looking across the whole country. Interestingly, the NHBC did a survey last year of smaller housebuilders. The Government is very concerned with supporting small housebuilders, who will be looked at to deliver some of these larger numbers of new homes, new entrants to the market being very important. The NHBC survey asked small housebuilders what the barriers to their business were, and the results revealed obtaining finance, which we have all heard before, availability and cost of land, and the cost of labour. Regulation and red tape was only reported by 4% of respondents. It is slightly ridiculous to use higher standards as a reason for the number of houses we need not being brought forward when we have these other huge barriers, which will still be there.

The Chairman: Can I just interject a thought? Part of the reason you cannot understand why everybody is not carbon-free is that the jury still seems to be out among government Ministers in both Houses of Parliament about whether or not we should spend a lot of money on this, when some of the cases have not been proven, and the other side of the coin is we do not create as much of this problem as China and other countries. People do not understand the size of it. It has not been very well or very simply explained. When we are told that we need a zero-carbon house, most men and women in the street would say, “What is the advantage? Why do we have to pay more for it?” There is a psychological problem.

Louise Sunderland: I think your second point about the house buyer perhaps not having been communicated to in the right way in the past is a very pertinent one. Certainly the industry has responded quite quickly, I would say, to the recent changes in the regulatory framework by putting a lot more focus on communicating with house buyers in ways they understand. There are two major initiatives coming at the moment that look to grade homes in line with the priorities people have, which might be costs, or health and wellbeing, but, as you say, carbon is sometimes an esoteric term.

Lord Inglewood: Is there any evidence about whether or not a green house or a zero-carbon house will command a higher price? Has anybody done any work on that?

Louise Sunderland: There is work going on at the moment by the BRE, who used to oversee and provide the assessment background to the Code for Sustainable Homes. That programme having been around for long enough now, they are looking at a piece of research on the resale value of higher-graded homes as opposed to other market homes or lower-graded homes. The research is due to come out very soon on whether those Code for Sustainable Homes accredited, high-standard homes, would command a higher price, and I would certainly recommend that the BRE come to the Committee when they have it.

Q256 Lord Inglewood: I was going to come back to a point in the argument which we left some time ago. On the assumption that we must improve energy efficiency in the buildings we have, what measures do you think are needed from the centre in order to assist bringing that about?

Louise Sunderland: There is a headline answer to that question, which the UK Green Building Council, along with a huge coalition of other organisations, is supporting as one of the most important measures that could be put in centrally, and this is for energy efficiency of the existing stock to be considered as a national infrastructure priority. A lot of research work has been done to look at how viable and effective this might be, and certainly an energy efficiency improvement programme across the existing stock meets the definition of infrastructure as set out by HM Treasury, the European Investment Bank and the International Energy Agency. So, it is possible within the framework we already have. Analysis has been done of the costs and benefits, and it has shown that there are net benefits to the economy and to the Treasury of £8.7 billion over 10 years from this investment. I can forward to the Committee that research and a shorter briefing paper.

The Chairman: That would be really useful.

Louise Sunderland: That really would unlock funds and also stability for a programme delivering energy efficiency going forward.

Q257 Baroness Rawlings: I wanted to come in on this energy efficiency question. Earlier you mentioned ventilation, not in private homes but in public buildings, and energy efficiency. Why is there a law that requires air conditioning or something that is on all through the winter, and even in the summer, when opening windows would save a fortune? Nobody ever mentions that officially you have to have air conditioning otherwise you cannot take a building—it is mainly commercial; I am not talking about private because anyone can do what they want, but there is a huge amount of waste when even in the winter air conditioning is used.

Louise Sunderland: Obviously, what you are pointing to is how buildings are run, and you have pointed to a conflict between people having heating on and opening the windows or air conditioning on in the winter when it is far too cold, and that is very much about how a building is run by its facilities manager—there will normally be one in place in commercial buildings, as you say. This is an area that the industry is aware of, and the group I am working with at the moment on the gap between design and performance is looking at how those facilities managers could be better equipped to understand the buildings and the systems and that they do not come into conflict. That is quite separate from any regulatory drivers; it is literally about practice. For me, it is about making sure that the facilities managers, the people in control of the building systems, have a closer relationship with those building users, and that they get better and more feedback about how they feel and what they want to experience in their building. If you think about commercial offices, it all adds to the desirability of that building, because obviously people are happier and more productive in environments which they find comfortable.

Q258 Baroness Young of Old Scone: Coming back to the energy efficiency of the existing building stock to be made a criterion for national infrastructure, if that does not happen, what is the answer?

Louise Sunderland: That is a very good question. A big piece of the puzzle is mechanisms to move the market so that the housing market better reflects a more efficient home versus a less efficient home. That would potentially unlock some of that householder capital that is spent on bathrooms and kitchens to make investment, because they will see a return. We are currently doing work, which started through a piece of research with University College London, looking at mortgage lenders making better assessments of the energy bill of a future home in their affordability assessment for the lending. That research showed there could be a huge differential between the lendable amount on an efficient home versus an inefficient one, given that the running costs of that home would be lower and therefore the household budget would be lower than that for a less efficient home. This is a project we are pursuing over the next year or two. Those kinds of mechanism which help the market illustrate difference and illustrate value would be helpful.

However, I do not think we can escape the fact that we need a national programme. The Green Deal provided potential for that but, unfortunately, it was slow to be taken up and there were a number of structural issues with the lack of incentives surrounding the finance mechanism that did not enable it to see its full potential. In the absence of the Green Deal, there is very little at the moment that could lead us to this kind of national programme. Of course, there is the huge issue of fuel poverty; it is a national disgrace that we have people who are choosing between heating and eating, and who obviously cannot access some of the programmes of finance such as the Green Deal because their income is too low and they would be reluctant to take on debt. There needs to be a nationally funded programme of work to help those households.

The Chairman: What about smart meters? They have really been kicked into the long grass, have they not? If most consumers and householders knew about the savings they could make on ever increasing energy bills just by knowing and turning things down, they could make sure they do not leave the lights on and all the rest of the things we know about but do not do because we do not even know what the impact is. There have been no friends in high places looking after that issue.

Louise Sunderland: I think smart meters could be useful, but I do not think they are a solution in themselves. If the Committee would allow a small anecdote, I had a smart meter installed in my own house two weeks ago and the installer came in, telling me every smart meter has to be accompanied by an in-home display that tells you what your home is using at the moment in terms of energy, which is the tool that you are pointing to that would allow people to better understand their usage. The installer plugged it in, left it in the kitchen, pressed a few buttons and explained how it works, and then said, “Don’t worry. You can unplug it and leave it in a cupboard”, which obviously is not the point. That is a small illustration of the fact that putting the meter in place as a tool that would potentially better inform householders about how to use their energy is helpful, but on its own it does nothing. If people become better informed about their household energy bills and their energy use, they could make the behavioural changes you are pointing to, but they also need the ability to make the more structural changes that will significantly reduce their bills.

The Chairman: If they are doing nothing at the moment, even that is something, is it not, until you get into a regulatory system where you are going to have to have structural changes? I think there is a lethargy about this section of the market, with people complaining bitterly about high energy bills and doing nothing about it.

Louise Sunderland: I agree with you that certainly smart meters, if rolled out in a more constructive way, with some compulsory time spent explaining how these things work, would be a much more useful tool. There is a fear, however, particularly with very low-income households, that raising awareness of the bill that is to come could add stress to someone’s lifestyle if they live in a home that is very difficult to heat adequately, yet they can see the pennies ticking over. Without giving people the real capacity to actually do something about it, that is a relatively damaging awareness to have.

Q259 Baroness Young of Old Scone: One last question on the private rented sector or the rented sector generally. There are few mechanisms for getting retrofit of energy efficiency into the rental sector, and the economic incentives are the wrong way round. Is there any solution to that?

Louise Sunderland: We obviously have the minimum energy efficiency standards that will come in to address the lowest-performing rented homes and commercial buildings from 2018 if they are in either a G or an F EPC banding, which are the bottom two. That is an incredibly important piece of legislation. There are concerns at the moment about enforcement and how enabled tenants will be to come forward and have anything done about it if their property does fall into a G or F banding. The better news about that piece of legislation is that in the commercial market we are already seeing a “brown discount”, so in expectation of that legislation coming in in 2018, those offices that are rented out that fall into one of those two lower bands are now starting to be discounted in the market because there is an acknowledgement that in the very near future they will not be market-suitable. That illustrates, quite a long way before the legislation necessarily bites, the power of that kind of tool. Obviously, in the housing sector the importance will then be on enforcement and the capacity of the local authority, which will be charged with enforcement, to make sure those pieces of legislation are brought into effect.

Q260 Baroness Rawlings: Finally, a theme that has been going through all our meetings so far which we have not touched on today is: are the right training and skills programmes in place to support the delivery?

Louise Sunderland: That is a really important question, and I am not surprised it has come into your Committee’s inquiry. I am probably not the best expert to ask on this issue. I can point you to work that is going on in this area. Labour is an issue at the moment, and we need to invest in the right skills, and adequate sustainability skills. Leading on from the local authority point, I have a concern around capacity and skills in local planning authorities, local building control, and in the enforcement of things like the minimum energy efficiency standards, because local authorities have suffered with cuts, they have lost staff, and in some local planning authorities in particular they have lost very experienced staff. That is a key challenge in terms of delivering where we do have good regulation. From the industry’s point of view, another overarching point is that the industry is relatively good at responding in training and development where there are clear signals. The current very wishy-washy regulatory framework—the policy direction that seems to have completely stalled if not gone backwards—is giving the wrong signals to the industry, which will find it more and more difficult to invest in training and skills if it does not see a need and demand for those specific skills, and of course, it is sustainability skills I am thinking of here. There are a couple of organisations doing a lot of work on this. The Green Construction Board has a knowledge and skills working group, and they have a priority action plan which looks at skills development through a lot of stages—through colleges, further education and all the way through professional development. The main point is that sustainability skills in particular should not be an added extra at this point in the development of the agenda. For every designer, contractor and builder, this should be as essential as any other part of the core curriculum, and we are not quite there yet.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, and thank you for taking the time and trouble to give us very detailed answers to our questions. It has been very useful to us. We have not had another green/sustainable witness giving us this sort of information, which we must have, otherwise our final report will be lopsided. Thank you very much indeed.

Louise Sunderland: Thank you very much for the opportunity.