The country has spoken and, once Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty has been triggered, two years or more of negotiations now lie ahead to come up with a roadmap for leaving the EU.
In the referendum debate, much has already been written about how leaving means that “hard-won environmental protections would be lost, and our ability to tackle climate change greatly damaged”, to quote the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. Once we’ve officially left, Britain will no longer be part of the kind of joint action we saw by EU nations in Paris last December that championed such a strong climate change deal in the COP21 talks and provided leadership to other countries to take a similarly ambitious position.
EU laws continue to apply in the UK for the two years after the process to leave has started. After that point we can try to stay part of some frameworks through negotiations, but this is a process that could take years.
With Brexit, the spectre of the repeal of the Climate Change Act 2008 looms large and it remains to be seen what will happen to our green energy targets – to generate 30% of electricity and 12% of heating energy from renewable sources – which are currently set by the EU Renewable Energy Directive.
In June, 17 of the UK’s biggest housebuilders declared that leaving the EU will make it harder and more expensive to build new homes, that production and import of materials such as bricks could be disrupted and labour affected. And post-Brexit, energy efficiency and performance of our homes and buildings – already deprioritised by the present government and yet with such a crucial role to play in reducing carbon emissions – risk dropping off the radar altogether.
Energy efficiency
There has been little mention to date of what Brexit means for buildings and energy efficiency. Buildings account for over 40% of UK CO2 emissions, so when new ones are built, or older ones refurbished, it is important that their expected energy use is kept to a minimum.
At present there is an agreed target for cutting carbon emissions across the continent by at least 40% (from 1990 levels) by 2030 and it is clear that improving the energy performance and efficiency of both our domestic and non-domestic buildings can make a significant contribution to meeting that target. EU directives have been instrumental to a number of initiatives, including energy efficiency audits and energy performance certificates.
But what if the UK is no longer governed by the 2010 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive or the 2012 Energy Efficiency Directive, the two key pieces of EU legislation when it comes to reducing the energy consumption of buildings? The UK government has already consigned the zero-carbon homes and zero-carbon buildings regulations to the scrapheap, so will we now find ourselves with no UK legislation in place and no incentive to work to EU legislation either?
Casualties could include valuable projects like the Greater London Authority’s RE:FIT scheme, which has just won a 2016 Ashden Award for Sustainable Buildings. Funded by the mayor of London and an EU grant, the GLA launched RE:FIT in 2009 to address energy inefficiency in public sector buildings in the capital. It does so by providing an expert team to give free technical and procurement advice, creating a framework that complies with EU law on public sector contracts, and through an energy performance contract to guarantee energy savings.
The results are impressive. In London alone, completed projects and those in progress will deliver a CO2 emission reduction of 30,000 tonnes/year, and save the client organisations £7.1m annually which in turn can be used to mitigate budget cuts to essential services. By March this year, more than 200 organisations in London had been engaged through RE:FIT, with 619 buildings being supported for retrofitting and £93m of investment leveraged. London projects to date have an average payback of eight years, have delivered cumulative savings of 308 GWh energy, 118,000 tonnes of CO2 and have also created an estimated 2,100 jobs in the energy services sector. Yet this is exactly the kind of initiative that we may see become a victim in the wake of Brexit, with an impact that goes beyond the energy performance of buildings, touching on livelihoods and reducing the amount of money available to the public sector that could be spent instead on essential services like health.
Sustainability
At present, under the 2010 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, EU countries must set minimum energy performance requirements for new buildings, for the major renovation of buildings and for the replacement or retrofit of building elements such as heating and cooling systems. Former Ashden UK Gold Award winner Radian, a housing association based in the South East, is an authority on both energy efficient retrofits and new builds.
The organisation retrofits its older homes – including insulation, double glazing, condensing boilers, solar water heating and solar panels – as part of ongoing maintenance work. But in some cases it also offers a top-to-toe eco-refurbishment, which can achieve a reduction of up to 90% in CO2 emissions. The housing association also builds new houses, with a growing number going well beyond the minimum standards required.
However, not all developers are so scrupulous and, without EU legislation to be governed by or UK regulations to aspire to, there’s a very real risk that future carbon emissions will be locked in for 50 years or more because of sub-standard housing being built.
Progress towards a more sustainable low-carbon built environment in the UK over the last couple of decades has been made in the context of EU-wide targets and funding sources. The biggest drivers for change are arguably stable mid- to long-term regulatory targets combined with a tax regime and funding subsidies that promote the use of sustainable technologies. European funding streams are a valuable source of income for sustained projects and, up until now, there has been considerable EU funding, such as the Horizon 2020 programme, for pan-European projects and research involving experts from several EU nations, which is enabling the development of sustainable building systems and technologies.
Take the Horizon 2020 Transition Zero project, being coordinated by the UK’s National Energy Foundation and initiated by Dutch firm Energiesprong. The EU funding ensures that thousands of homes on council estates and housing association properties in the UK will be given a carbon-neutral retrofit, meaning that the houses will not consume more energy for heating, hot water, lights and appliances than they produce.
As the project description indicates, the problem to get propositions like net zero energy refurbishments to the market is not around technical challenges requiring breakthroughs. The problem is a set of market conditions that are not right for the innovation process in the construction sector to take off. This type of EU funding is enabling cross-country consortiums to share knowledge and expertise as well as challenging the construction sector to undertake ambitious innovation processes. Will all this now be lost to Britain?
Implications for the construction sector
The talks that lie ahead as a result of Brexit will focus on negotiating access to the single market and creating new trade deals. Without access to an open market of sufficient size, there is little in the way of a business case for manufacturers to fund the development, certification and gearing up for the manufacture of such new systems. The UK market is tiny in this respect and many of the progressive construction products and systems come from Germany and other EU nations.
As noted by Kingsley Napley’s Brandusa Tataru-Marinesca earlier this year, according to the Department for Business Skills and Innovation, in 2010 around 64% of all building materials imported to the UK were from the EU and that 63% of our construction material exports were to the EU. Brexit could leave importers and exporters facing heavy duties or limits on quantities. A report by the Chartered Institute of Building based on national census data estimated that 9.6% of construction workers in 2011 were born outside the British Isles. A shortage of both labour – whether skilled or unskilled – and materials post-Brexit is likely to mean that it will cost the industry more to obtain them in the long run.
New targets required
If the EU laws which have provided the foundation for wider corporate sustainability strategies and targets in this country fall by the wayside or are considerably relaxed then there is the potential for standard solutions to be developed. This means that specialists in the built environment sector may no longer be employed in the same way and, although that might help limit construction costs, quality and energy consumption may suffer.
Our current national targets around the energy sector and a low carbon economy would probably be much lower if it were not for the European targets that drive these decisions. This is not the time to be relaxing legislation around building standards, or to bet on the market to pick up where the EU left off. We need strong, defined legislation which gives reassurance to investors and allows us to build beautiful structures that are passive and don’t use energy.
Sarah Butler-Sloss is the founder director of Ashden, a charity that rewards, supports and promotes sustainable energy leaders in the UK and developing and emerging economies www.ashden.org
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