The final item of business today is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-11466, in the name of Nigel Don, on fuel poverty in pre-1919 residential properties. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament understands that most residential properties built before 1919, including those in Angus North and Mearns, show significant disrepair and that a quarter have extensive disrepair; understands that residents in these dwellings are more likely to be in fuel poverty than those in more modern buildings; recognises the social consequences of poor housing conditions, and notes calls for those responsible for these properties to make a priority of effecting suitable repairs.
17:03
I bring the motion to the Parliament because although fuel poverty occurs across all regions, housing tenures and ages of property, it is significantly higher in pre-1919 buildings and in those constructed from traditional materials. Those pre-1919 buildings are not just the byres, the bothies or our ancient castles; they are the cottages, houses and tenements that are at the centre of our cities, towns and villages. Those buildings are the heart of our built heritage. They were built to last; indeed, the ones that we are concerned about have, of course, lasted at least thus far. Unfortunately, condition surveys tell a sorry tale.
At the meeting of the cross-party group on construction that was held at lunch time, we heard from Chiara Ronchini from the international scientific committee on energy and sustainability, who spoke knowledgeably and interestingly about the situation in Edinburgh. We also heard from Jamie Baker from East Lothian Council, who reviewed work on buildings in Haddington and Tranent.
Without wanting to be in any way particular by picking statistics from particular places—that would not help—I can mention general numbers, which may come as a surprise.
Around 90 per cent of pre-1919 properties need repairs. Many problems are in roofs and walls, and 70 per cent of faults are in critical elements.
Who cares? It sounds like a daft question. Historic Scotland plainly understands the problem but it is responsible for relatively few of our pre-1919 buildings—albeit that it is responsible for many of the high-profile, big and public ones.
Public bodies are probably generally aware of the issues and are likely to be trying to do something about them; they are also quite likely to be putting off repairs, partly for obvious reasons to do with budgets but often because they are trying to get out of old buildings before the repair issues become critical.
I think that most members will have talked to their local council about its buildings while knowing that the council is trying to move out of a building and centralise. A lot of capital expenditure in the national health service, particularly on new hospitals, seems to be driven by the desire to pull out of other buildings and therefore not to have to deal with the maintenance backlog. As long as the service gets into its new building, that works, of course.
Owner-occupiers and landlords probably do not understand the problem. That is where the difficulty for the Government lies. What do owners of buildings need to understand? I am grateful to Emily Tracey of the British Geological Survey, who also spoke at the cross-party group’s lunch time meeting. She reminded us that stone deteriorates in water, so roofs and fascias need to be waterproof and gutters and downpipes need to be kept clear and leak proof, so that they work.
I think that we have not got our heads round that, in general. The evidence around us suggests that most of us do not give much thought to those aspects of our homes. That might be because the issue is out of sight and out of mind—some of what we heard about at lunch time would be out of sight even for professionals; it might be because we are tenants and it is not our problem; or it might be because the issue is just too difficult.
We are much more likely to redo the kitchen or bathroom, perhaps inspired by popular television programmes, than we are to address the issue. According to Government figures, the £600 million that is spent each year on pre-1919 buildings has not reduced levels of disrepair.
It is perhaps necessary to say that homes that are not wind and watertight will waste huge amounts of heat. That is pretty obvious to members, to people in the gallery and to interested people who are listening to the debate, but I suspect that it is not obvious to the wider population.
Given the truth of that, it follows that there is little point in spending money on insulation if the escaping heat will bypass the insulation. Loft insulation that is soggy because it has been leaked on will just make matters worse. We absolutely must reduce energy use before we find ways of using renewable heat or microgeneration.
Fuel poverty is defined by reference to people’s incomes, which can hide what is going on. That is disturbing. Chiara Ronchini showed us in her presentation what is happening in the middle of Edinburgh—right here. The statistics show significant fuel poverty around the Parliament building but give the impression that there is no fuel poverty in the new town. The buildings in the new town are not significantly better or worse than the buildings round here; the statistics reflect the higher incomes in the new town.
It is clear that fuel poverty is more likely in rural communities that are off the gas grid. In general, oil and liquefied petroleum gas-fired boilers are more than 50 per cent more expensive to run than condensing gas boilers. Electricity is significantly more expensive still.
We need to put that in the context of climate change and global warming. It is clear that we must eliminate wasted heat, especially if it is generated from fossil fuels. We also need to make our houses more thermally efficient—the welfare, health and social benefits of doing so are obvious to us.
So, what is to be done? I appreciate that the Scottish Government is consulting on the issue and the more I researched what I was going to say in the debate, the more obvious it became to me that the issue is seriously complicated. However, I will finish with a couple of very specific points.
First, we know something about the size of the task. Survey work in Glasgow tells us that that city alone would need to employ about 300 masons for the next 20 years, using about 400,000 tonnes of stone, to deal with its traditional buildings. That gives us a glimpse of the financial challenge and the skills and materials that we need. I do not, of course, lay that challenge at the Government’s door; nonetheless, that is what we are looking at.
Secondly, property owners need to understand that it is important to maintain their buildings. In that regard, we need to recognise that we are starting from a very low base.
I look forward to hearing the other speeches in the debate. I have certainly enjoyed researching the issue and I will be very interested to hear the minister’s comments because I know that the Government is doing quite a lot of work on the issue as well.
17:10
I congratulate Nigel Don on securing this debate on fuel poverty in Scotland’s traditional buildings. As the motion quite rightly observes, many of the buildings in Scotland that predate 1919, including residential properties, are in a state of disrepair. Indeed, a quarter of those residential properties are in a state of extensive disrepair.
The experience of living in inadequate housing can have long-lasting effects, so I welcome the opportunity to speak up for people who are living in homes, including those in traditional buildings, that are not up to standard.
The relationship between poor housing and the occupier’s health, wellbeing and income is important to understand. According to the Chartered Institute of Housing,
“Evidence suggests that living in poor housing can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease as well as to anxiety and depression. Problems such as damp, mould, excess cold and structural defects which increase the risk of an accident also present hazards to health.”
The Marmot review team, working for Friends of the Earth, has established that living in a cold home and experiencing fuel poverty have an adverse impact on the mental health of a property’s occupiers. The team also found that
“Children living in cold homes are more than twice as likely to suffer from a variety of respiratory problems than children living in warm homes.”
I believe that Parliament understands the factors that lead to fuel poverty: low incomes, high energy prices and a lack of energy efficiency. Much of our political debate in recent months has focused on how to tackle low pay and improve household incomes by rethinking welfare reform and promoting the living wage. There has also been a great deal of commentary on the price of gas and electricity, the cost of living crisis and the need to reform energy markets.
The focus of this debate is on energy efficiency and the physical improvements that are needed to make traditional buildings more economical to heat and preserve, and how to do those things well.
I believe that the nourishing of our built environment and the preservation of our landscape heritage and historic townscapes enhance and enrich Scotland. Our traditional buildings contribute to the identity of our communities and our shared history. However, from farmhouses to city flats, those buildings are not there just to be appreciated; for many people in Scotland, those properties are their homes. Indeed, homes built before 1919 account for about a fifth of all residential properties in Scotland.
As a nation, we must ensure that we are equipped with the skills, the knowledge and the capacity to heat those homes efficiently and maintain them sustainably. I therefore commend the Scottish Government and Historic Scotland for the importance that they placed on energy efficiency in their strategy for traditional building skills.
The strategy identified challenges with insulating and upgrading traditional buildings. It also found gaps in training provision and that conventional insulation techniques are not always appropriate for older buildings. It explained that Historic Scotland continues to support research into traditional buildings and materials and into new techniques that could improve energy efficiency with the minimum of risk to older buildings. Perhaps the minister will address the implementation of the strategy, which was published in 2011, in her closing remarks.
The Scottish Government is duty bound to do all that it can to eradicate fuel poverty in Scotland by 2016. To achieve that, we must invest in traditional building and maintenance skills, and we must bring the benefits of new apprenticeships, new research and new techniques to some of our oldest buildings. We must also encourage private landlords of hard-to-heat older buildings to take up the initiatives that are available to them to make their homes more energy efficient for their tenants.
17:15
I am pleased to speak in the debate because, as a Highlands and Islands member, I am acutely aware of fuel poverty, which runs at over 50 per cent on many of our islands and in many of our off-gas-grid areas on the mainland. Part of the explanation for that is, as we have heard, high fuel costs, part is low wages and part is the high proportion of housing stock across the Highlands and Islands that is in poor repair and is not energy efficient.
I will describe a typical scenario. The house that I will use as an example is a common one. It is a one and a half storey cottage with dormer windows. It is about 150 years old, with stone walls and a slate roof. The roof is nail sick, the old iron square-headed nails having finally rusted away, and the horse-hair felt is ineffective in preventing the ingress of rain when slates come off, as they do every winter. The mortar between the stones has degraded and is porous, so the walls now act as a giant wick, transporting dampness into the interior. It has two rooms on the ground floor, with two bedrooms and a small bathroom upstairs. It originally had a fireplace in each of the rooms. A lean-to corrugated iron kitchen was built at the back in the 1960s and, in the 1970s, some plasterboard wall linings were introduced inside and all but one of the fireplaces were boarded up.
The occupant is a single mother who has two jobs, neither of which pays a living wage. She runs an old car that almost always manages to take her to work. Her cottage is heated by an open fire with a pan loaf back boiler that provides hot water, which was the height of modernity when it was installed. Her mother blessed it daily, just as she blessed Tom Johnston, who provided hydroelectricity to houses right across the Highlands and Islands, as well as storage heating complete with a reasonably priced storage heating tariff, which was the fuel poverty solution of that era.
Her brother wants to put up a wind turbine close by on his croft. He says that he could provide her with free electricity, but the local planning officer just smiled and shook his head and talked about the views. Her brother then got excited about solar panels on the roof. That would have been free electricity, too, but the wee man from the planning office smiled, shook his head again and talked about how picturesque the cottage is.
A nice young fellow from the council came to see her, brimming full of green deals and acronyms like ECO and HEEPS, but it all sounded too complicated and too costly, especially after the local builder had talked to her about the roof, the rising damp and the rot in the floors. When she asked how much it would cost, the builder just scratched his head, looked at his feet and mumbled something that sounded very like, “A hundred grand.”
It is going to be another long, cold winter. It is going to be wet and it is going to be windy but, every now and then, the sun will break through and the views will be breathtaking.
17:19
I apologise to you, Deputy Presiding Officer, Nigel Don and the minister for the fact that I will be unable to stay to the end of the debate. I have other parliamentary business that I require to attend to.
I thank Nigel Don for bringing the motion before the Parliament. We should all concern ourselves with the issue, but the mention of properties built before 1919 in Angus North and Mearns attracted me to the motion because I have personal experience of those properties. I spent my early years in a freezing farmhouse a couple of miles north of Drumlithie with our backs to the hills. When the wind blew down off those hills, it seemed to have the strange ability to blow straight through a stone wall and along the lobby. I remember the rare occasion when we had to hang coats on the back of the outside door to stop the snow blowing through the planks. Those were, perhaps, extreme measures.
The housing that was built in that area, mostly in the 19th century, was, in its day, of surprisingly high quality. That is why many of the houses still stand firmly to this day. However, they are not of the standard that we would wish them to be. The house in which I was brought up was subject to grant-aided modernisation—in fact, the job was completed about 40 years ago this year. It still stands—in fact, my son occupies it—and is in good condition. However, we know that, when it comes to energy efficiency, such houses are not of the standard that we would like.
The advantage that a previous generation had of being able to use grants that were administered by local government to modernise older properties gives us a lesson about what we must consider now.
It is surprising that, when it comes to home insulation, money is not the problem. Many grant schemes are available and there are also opportunities for money that is raised through energy charging to be used to insulate and modernise some of the houses that we are talking about and bring them up to the higher energy efficiency standard. However, I have spoken to people—Government employees, in many cases—who find themselves in the strange situation of almost not being able to give the money away. They are trying to persuade people to take the opportunities but they will not take them up.
The challenge that we have is, first, to let people know what modern technology can do: how proper insulation of an old property can massively reduce the energy costs that are associated with the property. We need people to understand the benefits that they will get from a little investment.
Next, we need to make sure that the available resource is targeted at those people who understand the need and that we expand the knowledge of what can be achieved. Only by ensuring that people believe the stories that they are told about energy efficiency and the possibilities that it brings will we be able to get them involved in making their homes more energy efficient. The challenge is education about not only what is available but what returns can be obtained.
Many people in communities such as the one in which I was brought up still find themselves in the situation that I have spoken about in the past minute or two. Many of them are owner-occupiers and many of them have limited resources. The challenge for us is to not limit the scope of our ambition and to ensure that the opportunities that I have spoken about are made available to all and made available as soon as possible.
17:24
As others have done, I congratulate Nigel Don on securing time for the debate. I thank all those who have contributed to it.
Tackling fuel poverty is a key part of the Scottish Government’s focus on building a fairer Scotland and tackling inequality. As Nigel Don pointed out, pre-1919 homes have higher fuel poverty levels than the national average and typically have lower energy efficiency ratings than newer houses. It is a cause for concern that, since 2009, we have seen reductions in fuel poverty across houses in every age band except those that were constructed before 1919.
As I believe was pointed out by Margaret McDougall, fuel poverty has a complex mix of causes, including major factors such as fuel costs and welfare rules, over which the Scottish Government has little control. Nevertheless, there are things that we can do, such as actions to encourage energy efficiency improvements and address disrepair in our housing stock.
Nigel Don is right to highlight the disrepair in our older housing stock and its capacity to exacerbate fuel poverty. Energy efficiency improvements can be undermined by disrepair. Homes that are not wind and watertight are likely to be inefficient, and some types of disrepair such as roofs and windows in poor condition can make homes more expensive to heat; most members have alluded to that. The Scottish house condition survey indicates that homes built before 1919 remain among those that are most likely to suffer from extensive disrepair.
Responsibility for looking after homes lies in the first instance with home owners, so owners need to be responsible and keep their homes in good condition. As many members have mentioned, there is a behavioural lesson to be learned. I think that it was Nigel Don who pointed out that people think more about their kitchens and bathrooms than about the overall fabric of their house. However, we have to encourage home owners to be responsible and to keep their homes in good condition.
Local authorities, as strategic housing authorities, have a wide range of discretionary powers to deal with disrepair in private homes. I believe that they are best placed to develop and co-ordinate an appropriate response, including advice and financial assistance where it is most needed. I recognise that, as Mike MacKenzie mentioned, some home owners need additional support to look after their homes. Not everyone can afford to do what is required to be done.
The Housing (Scotland) Act 2014 strengthened the powers that are available to local authorities to manage disrepair. As part of our sustainable housing strategy, the Scottish Government is developing proposals on common housing standards across all tenures, in collaboration with stakeholders. Where the owner is a landlord, we expect them to meet additional responsibilities. Social landlords are working towards achieving the Scottish housing quality standard by April 2015. Part of that standard is to ensure that their homes are energy efficient. Private landlords must ensure that the homes that they let meet a statutory repairing standard, which, among other things, requires homes to be wind and watertight. The energy efficiency standard for social housing, which was published in March 2014, aims to further improve the energy efficiency of the social housing stock in Scotland. Social landlords are expected to meet the first milestones by December 2020.
The Scottish Government is working with a group of key stakeholders to develop proposals on the regulation of energy efficiency in private sector homes, which will be published for public consultation in Spring 2015. I think that it was Nigel Don who pointed out that there are complexities around that, because private home owners as well as private landlords will have to meet the standards.
We know that the most sustainable way of tackling fuel poverty is by raising the energy efficiency of homes. That is why, over the past three years, the Scottish Government has invested more than £220 million in a range of fuel poverty and energy efficiency programmes, which Alex Johnstone spoke about. Those measures have an estimated net gain in household income of more than £1 billion, and more than 600,000 households in Scotland have benefited from the measures. We must encourage people to take up the measures that are available and ensure that they know what is out there.
Our commitment to tackling fuel poverty is strengthened by our budget of £79 million in this financial year and next. That funds our area-based schemes, our energy assistance scheme and our energy advice centres. In October, the First Minister announced a new national fuel poverty scheme that is potentially worth up to £224 million over seven years.
The Scottish Government has taken significant action to help address fuel poverty within the constraints that we face. Our actions have been hampered by the changes to the United Kingdom Government’s energy company obligation. The uncertainty that has been caused by those changes has led to a number of planned schemes that are focused on areas of fuel poverty in Scotland being unable to proceed. In light of those changes, we are working closely with councils and registered social landlords on how best to support the delivery of energy efficiency measures.
As part of the Smith commission process, we called for increased powers to tailor fuel poverty policies to the specific needs of Scottish households, which includes houses built before 1919. Lord Smith of Kelvin has now published his recommendations. The First Minister has welcomed the transfer of those powers and we await further clarity on their scope in relation to energy efficiency.
Members may wish to note that their constituents can get impartial advice on energy efficiency and find out exactly what support they are eligible for by calling the Scottish Government’s home energy Scotland hotline on 0808 808 2282 or by visiting www.greenerscotland.org—the home energy Scotland website. Around a third of Scottish households have already had advice from the hotline since it started.
I commend Nigel Don for securing the debate and members for their contributions. Fuel poverty is an important issue, which the Government is committed to addressing. As part of that, we recognise the importance of tackling disrepair in pre-1919 homes.
Meeting closed at 17:31.Previous
Decision Time