Giving evidence to BEIS committee, major housebuilder admits it was in favour of scrapping zero carbon policy as part of push to unlock construction of more new homes
Homebuilder Persimmon lobbied the government to axe the zero carbon homes policy in 2015, less than a year before it was due to come into effect, the company admitted yesterday.
Giving evidence to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee, Persimmon's group planning and strategic land director Peter Jordan said the homebuilder argued in favour of government ditching the policy back in 2015.
"I believe that we worked with government and thought the right thing to do to get us building more quickly was to put it on hold and then review the building regulations afterwards," he said.
The revelation came just ahead of Chancellor Philip Hammond's Spring Statement, scheduled for this afternoon, which is expected to include plans for new houses to have low-carbon heating systems and higher energy efficiency standards.
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recently published a major new report warning that UK housing policies were lagging behind where they need to be to prepare the housing stock for escalating climate impacts and ensure carbon targets are met.
The zero carbon homes policy was first set out by then-Chancellor Gordon Brown in 2006. It comprised of a series of new rules meant to ensure the UK's stock of new homes were the most energy efficient possible, in order to help meet UK carbon targets and avoid the need for costly retrofits in the future.
Under the proposed standard new homes would have been fitted with green energy generation technology such as solar panels and state-of-the-art energy saving technology where appropriate, while a programme to allow housebuilders to bank carbon savings at off-site projects would also have been introduced.
The government's shock decision to axe the policy drew widespread criticism from environmental campaigners and some businesses, especially given the rules were backed by a number of building firms and housebuilders had been preparing to comply with the new standards.
But the government argued ditching the Zero Carbon Homes standard would remove red tape and curb costs for housebuilders, allowing them to build more homes to address the country's housing shortage.
Persimmon's Jordan argued yesterday that the axing of the rules had delivered a boost in housebuilding since 2015. "It helped us maintain our supply chains and push production and growth," he said. "In that time [since the standard was axed in 2015] we have built up our supply chains, worked hard with our boiler manufacturers, with our supplier specifications, and our Space4 factories, to get to a point that we are ready for change."
But Barratt Developments' group chief executive David Thomas said the axing of the standard had not been a "significant factor" in driving up house building rates since 2015. Barratt Homes said it was in favour of the Zero Carbon Homes Standard, and had not been in favour of the decision to ditch the policy.
Green building advocates have consistently argued that introducing a standard across the industry would lead to economies of scale that would result in a negligible increase in purchase costs for home buyers, while delivering them significant savings on their energy bills.
A study released last month by the ECIU think tank calculated that axing the standard had resulted in energy bills for new build homeowners that were £200 a year higher than they would otherwise have been.