Sustainable Development UK

Greening The Home Front

When it comes to addressing climate change and securing Britain’s energy supply, the Conservatives place a considerable focus on the individual home. Greg Barker, the shadow minister for climate change and the environment, has previously pledged to replace “short-term gimmicks” with a long-term strategy, including ensuring greater investment is made into the housing stock.

Speaking to SDUK, he explains his party’s plans to “unleash” private sector money into retrofitting existing homes with energy efficient measures and micro-generation technology. “We are committed to unleashing private sector capital to transform the energy efficiency of our housing stock, which would allow up to £6,500 to be spent on the average home,” Barker reveals. This would be achieved through debt secured against each property, with the repayment costs offset by the energy savings made, the shadow minister explains. “We will allow private sector companies, the energy companies, to secure debt finance against the transmission charges that are currently levied on everybody’s bills. But they’ll be secured against each house, rather than individuals. Then the charges will remain with the house when somebody moves on. This will mean there will be long-term funds raised, which will be repaid over 25 years through domestic bills, but the benefits and savings will be immediate for everyone who takes advantage of them.”

The Conservatives support the government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment, an internal emissions trading scheme aimed at reducing carbon pollution. However, Barker notes that his party would take it one step further, allowing firms to contribute to their reduction targets by increasing the energy efficiency of their employees’ homes. He cautions: “This is a very useful and interesting scheme but we don’t want to be too reliant on it. The thing about climate change is there is no one big solution and we need to make sure that we’re doing all we can in every direction and not just relying on one or two flagship schemes.”

Another way a Conservative government would seek to cut the country’s emissions using homes is through microgeneration. “We are committed to a new regime of feed-in tariffs that will work for renewable electricity that will particularly focus on helping the consumer become a generator as well as a user of energy. We see that as providing long-term, predictable incentives that will be good for consumers and also good for industry.” Microgeneration and other renewable technologies should be “much more ambitiously employed”, the shadow minister argues. “Renewables are vital, whether they are microgeneration at home or in small businesses or whether they are large, offshore wind farms. We want to see a complete shift in the way that we view renewables in the UK,” he states, adding: “We’ve got to get away from being dependent on just onshore wind, or one or two narrow technologies, there’s so much potential in UK PLC, there is so much great research, so many terrific ideas coming out of our universities and research houses, we need to make sure that we are fully capitalising on those.”

To maximise this potential, Barker explains the Conservatives would “set up a network of high-tech green incubators, to encourage the leap from research and development into commercialisation”. The party would “bring forward proposals to extend a grid offshore to invest ahead of the curve in offshore renewables and establish marine parks so that we don’t just push existing technologies but that we do everything we can to enable other forms of renewable marine technology, such as wave and tidal, to be tapped as well”.

Empowering individual households to combat climate change is important because maintaining public enthusiasm for environmental efforts is “absolutely vital”, both in terms of supporting the climate change agenda and for active participation at home and work, Barker insists. “People need to be able to look to government for real leadership on climate change. The problem to date has been that they’ve constantly been berated by government for not doing enough, yet government itself has not pulled its own weight.

“Why should the public do more if they’re seeing new coal-fired power stations springing up, or the Labour government giving the green light to another runway at Heathrow? These things completely swamp anything that anyone could do in their own lives, so it’s really important that politicians are consistent and ambitious, and don’t just use the public as a convenient way of offloading their own responsibilities,” he argues.

Should the Conservatives come to power ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, Barker will be keen for any deal to address the emissions of the entire world. “We obviously want the developing economies as well as the developed economies to be tied in to long-term, ambitious targets which collectively will help us meet our climate ambitions for 2050. I think in particular, that has to mean bringing the issue of rainforests into the overall global deal. The burning of rainforests currently contributes more CO2 into the atmosphere than all of the world planes and cars put together, and we can’t allow that to go on.”

The Conservative plans to meet the pressing issue of climate change go beyond the home and include investment in carbon capture and storage demonstration plants, and a more varied energy mix. However, Barker is adamant that enabling people to take steps in their own homes will reduce the country’s emissions and drive support for workplace action. “We want homeowners, communities and business to become more energy self-sufficient and more energy aware as well, which will not only help drive down the costs in the long-term but also make the country as a whole less dependent on hydrocarbons from dangerous parts of the world.

“A lot of the issues around climate change can often appear technical or irrelevant to people’s everyday lives. It is really important that politicians are able to capture the imagination of the public by painting an attractive and secure, long-term picture of a low-carbon Britain.”

Greg Barker, shadow minister for climate change and the environment, spoke to Felicity King-Evans, editor