Keeping warm this winter

For many people in Crawley and across the UK, the rising cost of energy made last year’s heating bill hard to afford. With many households already struggling to make ends meet, Crawley took the unusual decision to provide warm spaces in public buildings to try to ensure residents had at least somewhere they could avoid the cold.

While the unit cost of energy will be lower this winter, the absence of a government-funded energy support scheme this year will mean that many families are facing another cold winter.

The UK isn’t without options. The country is far too slow to deliver new renewable energy projects and with the political will we could have drastically reduced the nation’s reliance upon gas over the course since Russian action began in Februrary last year.

Alternatively, as a producer of natural gas, the UK Government could have used regulatory action to ensure that domestically produced gas remained within the UK and sold at a much lower price than the global average, reducing the cost of heating bills.

Lastly, we could have undertaken radical action on insulation to reduce the overall need for energy for heating in the UK. The impact of effective insulation can be significant. At the most extreme end, where properties are built to the PassivHaus standard–as the borough council has been aiming to do for as many new properties as possible–their energy needs for heating essentially drops to zero.

The standard of insulation in Crawley really isn’t great, with 48% not even meeting basic energy standards. Of course, the most damining thing about that statistic is that of 331 local authority areas in England, Crawley’s insulation is actually the 14th best in the country. We have to get much, much better at this.

Unfortunately, retrofitting is much harder than creating well-insulated buildings from scratch–raising big questions about why the powers local authorities have to ensure new build properties are properly insulated remain so weak. In terms of council properties, Crawley has been working with experts from the University of Southampton for a number of years to develop a plan for deliving net zero across the council’s housing stock. It’s an enormous job and the funding isn’t all there, but there are certainly benefits stemming from both economies of scale and the fact that the council already has to have various budgets for maintaining and improving properties which can be switched over from conventional options to greener options over the course of the next 27 years.

Yet, despite Crawley still containing one of the highest levels of social housing in the country, 75-80% of the town’s housing is in now in private ownership, which raises questions as to how these works will be funded, particularly given the incredible growth in real-terms debt involved in home ownership over the last forty years.

Despite the challenges, this is clearly essential if we are going to address the Climate Emergency. Yet, away from this more traditional debate around the importance of insulation in the context of climate change, the energy requirements for heating a house are now very much a central question of whether or not people can make ends meet at home, and an important part of preserving the UK’s national security and independence from energy exporting dictatorships. The time for debate is over, we need urgent action on insulation.