More Green Waste as Council Confirms it is Not Monitoring Eco-Housing Pilot Scheme

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.