Thank you for inviting me. The domestic sector is responsible for about 30 per cent of all emissions from Scotland. Of those emissions, about 66 per cent goes in space heating, 16 per cent in water, 3 per cent in cooking and 15 per cent in lighting and appliances. Homes are incredibly important to Scotland because citizens are important to their legislators. An average of about 30 per cent of households across Scotland are in fuel poverty, and in some deprived areas—in Dundee and rural Lochaber, for instance—the percentages are higher, so homes really matter.
The move to 30 per cent more renewables over the past five or six years has masked a significant problem in the domestic sector. We are controlled by legislation via Europe to manage the domestic sector. The European energy performance of buildings directive is concentrated on certification to improve the stock incrementally, so every time a building is sold, you have to improve its performance and so on. The energy efficiency directive is a framework of measures promoting energy efficiency, with connotations of machine performance. The ecodesign directive mandates the performance of things such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning to try to get incremental improvements in efficiency. There is also the ozone depletion directive.
Unfortunately, year on year, our buildings and houses—even the modern ones—become more challenging. The traditional Scottish house was fairly robust. It might have been leaky and fairly solid with cold bridges and so on, but the roof did not blow off. Let me look at domestic development of efficiency in the past couple of decades. In the 1990s, we had the passive house, which was rather simplistic. You put insulation around a building, stopped the airflow through the windows and doors—so you stopped the draughts—got rid of cold bridging in the structure, put in double glazing or better windows and put a machine at the centre of it. It had a lot of stringent targets, too. In the noughties, we became more interested in sustainability and there was a move to better comfort, better indoor air quality and so on.
Now we are beginning to realise that, with the next generation of housing, we have created problems. For instance, in modern, light-weight, cheap-to-build, highly insulated timber housing with very little air movement, people are experiencing very bad indoor air-quality problems. Such houses often have big windows that do not have bits that it is possible to open. The solution is a small machine. We are getting chronic problems of overheating in Scotland, which Tim Sharpe at Glasgow School of Art has done a lot of work on. That means that, eventually, more Scottish homes will be air conditioned, and that will cost. We already know that many people in Scotland cannot afford to heat their homes in winter, and they will not be able to afford to cool their homes in summer. Therefore, we have a real problem.
The Sullivan report mentioned the process of engaging with stakeholders. When we develop our action plans, we engage with stakeholders. Who do we engage with? We engage with Homes for Scotland, the Scottish Property Federation, Construction Scotland and, down the line, the Scottish Government’s buildings standards division. We engage with people who make much higher profits by building lighter and cheaper housing for citizens. If we genuinely want the domestic sector to have a resilient and robust future that includes large emissions reductions, we will need to start ventilating houses naturally again, getting rid of the machines and running them on solar energy. Through the use of solar hot water and solar photovoltaic cells plus storage, we could reduce the 30 per cent of emissions that come from the domestic sector by 15 per cent tomorrow. We could make significant reductions, but we will not do that by tinkering about and getting improvements of 1 or 2 per cent in the heat pumps that we put in buildings, which is what will happen if the lobbyist-driven vested interests of Europe and elsewhere are allowed to prevail in the legislative process.