Readers may remember Ben Pile’s article last month which mentioned Sir Keir Starmer’s 2022 visit to eco-upgraded houses owned by Kirklees Council.
Eight houses in Abbey Road, Fartown, Huddersfield were given heat pumps instead of gas boilers, plus insulation, triple-glazed windows and solar panels.
The Daily Mail reported the then-Opposition leader’s 2022 Conference speech praising the scheme, which Kirklees Council originally estimated would cost about £60,000 per house and save up to £350 on annual energy bills (so take at least 172 years to pay for itself).
Kirklees said it “would be monitoring the performance of the properties to inform future schemes we carry out”. As the Mail reported, retrofitting the nation’s 1.6 million council-owned homes in this way would cost £96 billion (tens of billions here, tens of billions there, soon you’re talking serious money…).
So would that be worth doing? The council just answered an FOI request about its Abbey Road scheme:
Cost per house? “We do not have an accurate cost per property to provide this information”
What sort of solar panels? “Four properties had photovoltaics fitted and four properties had solar thermal fitted.” So, four sets of panels to generate electricity and four to heat water (though not the house whose roof they’re on) – if the sun’s shining. And Kirklees can’t compare one type with the other because:
Fuel savings per house (i.e., comparison of current bills with previous ones)? “We do not have information to make a reliable comparison and this is our residents [sic] sensitive information.” The “monitoring” hasn’t happened.
Any help from central Government? “No this work was not grant funded by central Government.”
So no-one knows what it cost or whether it was worth doing – though we do know that cost was shouldered by Huddersfield taxpayers. Fit and forget is the way, when it’s public money.
If at this week’s Labour conference our Prime Minister refers to Huddersfield’s green triumph again, perhaps some reporter will think to ask him what he believes was really achieved? Because Kirklees Council doesn’t know.
In September 2008 our local London Borough of Camden spent an incredible £360,000 (at least) eco-refurbishing a Victorian semi, 17 St. Augustine’s Rd, and showed it off proudly on open days. Labour councillors were outraged when I pointed out in the local paper that they’d overlooked the cheapest, most obvious energy-saving measure of all – despite an ample corridor they’d failed to fit a lobby inside the front door, which lets out so much heat every time it’s opened in winter. They’d also done nothing about capturing rainwater to flush toilets – their ‘water harvesting’ was a single butt on a downpipe, to water the garden!
On a sunny autumn afternoon the roof’s solar thermal panels weren’t working at all, the hot water cylinder was cold; and interestingly, the idea of a heat pump had been discarded as “impractical” for such a house – back to gas. There were other obvious omissions.
But the worst issue was the huge cost of the makeover – fine if public money’s paying for it, but even with a 0% loan, a householder could never recover the outlay from savings on heating bills, as the council wanted us to believe.
Just as at Kirklees, we were told before-and-after energy bills would be compared and lesson learned. I never did find out how that worked out, and if Camden found the answer impressive, it kept it pretty quiet. Spending other people’s money is easy, as so many Labour councils know, and upgrading the U.K.’s publicly-owned housing will be a good way to spend a very great deal of it.
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Sadly, monetary expenditure doesn’t matter when it comes to “saving the planet”. It’s more important to be seen to be “doing the right thing by the environment” regardless of the cost. OK, the population may be saddled with crippling taxes, OK, the economy might crash, OK, society might crumble under the pressure, but we’ll be able to hold our heads up high as a nation and say “We did our bit by reducing the world’s carbon emissions by 1%”. And then sit back and realise that all the pain it’s inflicted on us has had no effect on the climate after all.
Yep, you got it in one.
Cost per house? “We do not have an accurate cost per property to provide this information”
This is a lie, obviously. They must have paid invoices for equipment and installation. Ergo, the cost is grossly disproportionate to any alleged benefit.
Weasel words – ‘We don’t know accurately the cost per property because we know we can’t just add it all up and divide by eight because some properties had PV and some had thermal solar panels. Therefore, it’s technically true that we can’t give an accurate cost per property.’
The fact they’ve refused suggests they’ve spent more than £60,000 x 8 = £480,000. If not, they’d be patting each other on the back about the massive savings they’d made.
I hope the information commissioner does not back the refusal of the FOI request on the basis that revealing the costs would be too controversial.
Yes, they lie.
Or it was paid to a few councillors mates?
Milton Friedman’s 4th way of spending money illustrated perfectly. Spending other people’s money on other people means you are not interested in either price or quality. Government spending in a nutshell – just spend it.
172 years? Nonsense. It’ll only take 12 years (if energy prices increase at 50% per year).
Exactly the same as my council. The only eco-focused properties in the borough are those built by the taxpayers’ £££s. No intention to find out if it’s value for money.
Such standards are classed as “nice to have” where private housing is being proposed, despite the declaration of the climate crisis. Hypocrisy writ large.
It isn’t supposed to be monitored they make the momey upfront because the agenda is purpose built to funnel money that way to the appropriate parties. They did well out of it. Never mind that it is fading now they are pulling money out and making money on the way down just look at electric cars.
This is par for the Net Zero course. Net Zero was waved through parliament with no discussion of cost/benefit. There was no debate and no vote. The Political Class have imposed this on us all under the false pretences of a climate crisis in order to comply with the UN’s Sustainable Development goals. Our governments are simply local administrators implementing globalist mandates, and taking their instructions from the UN/WEF. We are simply an inconvenience to them and any concerns we have are brushed aside.
All dead but we pay anyway. Can you even conceive of a way that we would get the lost money back from the last forty years. The best we can do is stop it and never allow it to happen again.
I can conceive that if they re-introduced gladiatoral combat, with the Uniparty clowns who gave us all this crap and the eco-profiteers who paid them, scrapping with hungry tigers and lions, the ticket sales would make a very big contribution to the lost money.
And hugely enhance public jollity.
I think we have to be a bit more aggressive in our response to this sort of obfuscation. When people complete these schemes, and refuse to reveal their results, we should be saying, very loudly indeed, that the only possible reason is that they have failed. And asking not what the results really were, but why they refuse to admit failure.
With Socialists it’s money no object so long as it’s not their own.