LAS CONDICIONES DE TRABAJO Y DE VIVIENDA

2.5.1 Retrofit Policy

Over the last decade a range of Government policies and initiatives have been introduced, in an attempt to address the challenge of reducing carbon emissions from housing and tackling fuel poverty. For example, the Decent Homes Standard, aiming to deliver a reasonable degree of thermal comfort through effective insulation and heating. The social housing sector has made considerable progress and by

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2009 86% of homes in the sector were considered to be decent (National Audit Office, 2010). The Warm Front Scheme has delivered measures to 2.3 million heating and insulation improvements to households on certain income-related benefits living in properties that are poorly insulated and/or do not have a working central heating system. Also, the previous Government’s ‘Warm Homes, Greener Homes: A Strategy for Household Energy Management’ outlined ambitious targets (backed by schemes such as the FiT and RHI) to deliver huge numbers of energy efficiency measures and create tens of thousands of jobs in a new industry of energy efficiency (DECC, 2010c).

In essence the approach prior to the 2010 election has been to retrofit energy efficient or low carbon technologies either by funding their installation through Government funded schemes such as the Decent Homes Standard, Warm Front Scheme, CERT and CESP, or though Government provided financial incentives to make their installation more attractive, such as the Feed-In Tariff. This has resulted in significant retrofit programmes and an improvement in the standard of homes, especially in the social housing sector. Funding for these programmes has been delivered through Government grant schemes for improving energy efficiency. It could be argued that this approach has been predominately state managed and represents a social welfare retrofit approach.

More recently, since the 2010 election of the Coalition Government, the principle of delivering energy efficient retrofits to reduce carbon emissions and reduce fuel poverty has not changed. However, the shift in political power appears to have created a shift in the mechanisms to fund retrofit application.

The post-2010 Government strategy for reducing carbon emissions and fuel poverty is similar in many respects to the previous Labour Governments approach, whereby the retrofit of energy efficient and low carbon technologies to existing homes is intended to significantly reduce energy use and carbon emissions from UK housing. Indeed, even flagship policies such as the Green Deal and ECO, announced by the Government immediately after the 2010 general election had their foundations in previous government policy such as the Labour Government’s Pay As You Save (PAYS) programme. On the surface they are very similar schemes, however, unlike PAYS which would utilise Government funding Green Deal is effectively a loan which needs to be paid back (through energy bills) over a set period by any member of the public living in a home which has been subject to the Green Deal scheme.

Essentially the capital investment for the retrofit of all UK homes will be mobilised by encouraging the public to take out loans against their homes instead of being provided by state grants. One of the defining principles of Green Deal is that it will create economic growth and jobs, and it appears that the capital being mobilised by such loans will be used to generate business and growth through the range of organisations now involved (or created) due to the Green Deal scheme, such as Green Deal Providers, Green Deal Assessors, Certification Bodies and Green Deal Finance Companies. In this sense, Green Deal is shifting the responsibility for delivering energy efficiency programmes away from the state and towards private industry. The market has essentially been put forward as a core means of delivering economic growth, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and tackling fuel poverty.

It could be argued that the post-2010 retrofit policy context has shifted from a state managed social welfare approach towards a private finance and private industry approach. A likely explanation of this change in approach after the 2010 election is due to the change in political power and associated political stances of the previous Labour Government and the subsequent, Conservative-dominated Coalition Goverment. Nevertheless, the influence of the economic recession and the UK’s budget deficit on political strategy cannot be ignored, and this is likely to have created further urgency for policies which not only proritise economic growth, but also bring a private sector focus.

The Energy Company Obligation (ECO) which will support cases when the ‘Golden Rule’ of the Green Deal will not apply. ECO will supersede existing obligations to reduce carbon emissions (CERT and CESP) which expire at the end of 2012. ECO is particularly important for the social housing sector as it currently unlikely that the Green Deal will be applicable or workable for socially rented properties and previously utilised funding from CERT and CESP will cease in 2012. ECO has been criticised by NEA and JRF (2011) for being inequitable due its funding being sourced through flat-rate levies on all household energy bills. This also reflects the general shift in Government policy towards the public paying for energy efficiency measures instead of through grant-aided efficiency programmes.

These changes in the policy context have important implications for the social housing sector. Green Deal and ECO will soon be the only energy efficiency retrofit programmes available. The end of Government grant-aided energy efficiency programmes leaves minimal avenues for social housing to fund the delivery of

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retrofit programmes and address the needs of fuel poor tenants which make up a significant proportion of households. Delivering Green Deal in social housing is likely to be problematic because RSLs own the housing stock and tenants are liable for the bills, therefore tenants will be paying for improvements on a home that they do not own and investing their money in the RSLs housing stock. ECO could have been an avenue to deliver retrofit programmes to target vulnerable fuel-poor households, however this has been delivered and the scheme is provided through inequitable flat-rate levies on energy bills will unfairly penalise financially disadvantaged households.

2.5.2 Behaviour Change Policy

As discussed above the policy focus is on the improvement of building performance through technology application, however the influence of occupant energy use behaviour on the effectiveness of such technology application has not been mentioned in the policy literature. Where the policy literature does focus on environmental and energy related behaviour it pays relatively little attention to acts of behaviour relating to energy use, focusing more on behaviours which involve the consumption and/or installation of particular products or technologies which aim to improve energy efficiency. This is concerning because other research has indicated that occupant behaviour can have a significant influence on the energy use in buildings (Gill et al., 2010; Stevenson and Leaman, 2010). Therefore, there is a risk that the policy of retrofitting homes may not achieve potential energy efficiency or fuel poverty and carbon reduction targets due to the impact of occupant behaviour.

In terms of the behaviour change policy context there again been a shift in approach due to the change in government in the 2010 elections. The previous Labour Government had developed ‘Framework for pro-Environmental Behaviours’ (DEFRA, 2008), which focused on environmental attitudes and behaviours in relation to carbon emissions. The framework identified behavioural goals and set out an approach to changing behaviour through DEFRA’s informational campaigns, such as, Act on CO2. The framework argued that there was a mandate for

Government to take action to help ‘green’ those lifestyles. Interestingly, after the 2010 elections DEFRA’s updated ‘Framework for Sustainable Lifestyles’ (2011) indicate a shift in terminology and approach moving away from the idea of ‘changing behaviour’ and towards ‘influencing behaviour’. This may have been a way of distancing the Coalition Government from the previous Labour Government’s more

overt policy interventions, which led to the labelling of the revious Labour Government as a ‘nanny state’ (Bowden, 2011). The policy literature suggests that the current Government is attempting to take a more subtle approach to behaviour change policy in the vein of the ‘Nudge’ concept or Choice Architecture (Science and Technology Select Committee, 2011). This links to the idea of ‘Libertarian Paternalism’, i.e. that it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behaviour while also respecting freedom of choice. However, as discussed earlier (see 2.4.4) the policy literature indicates that ‘Nudge’ is less about encouraging behaviour change in terms of domestic energy use and more about encouraging the public to purchase energy efficient technologies. It is also worth questioning if this is actually about ‘choice’ or simply another version of ‘stick’ (increasing energy bills due to levies) and ‘carrot’ (opportunity to reduce energy bills through a Green Deal retrofit).