Report: UK needs to stop 'misusing' buildings

Existing buildings in the UK will need to be “radically refurbished” if the Government is to meet its carbon emissions reductions goals, according to a new report from the Economic and Social Research Council and Technology Strategy Board.

The release of the study, “How people use and ‘misuse’ buildings,” also coincides with a new report from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee calling on the Government to make building retrofits a priority in its green stimulus programme.

According to “How people use and ‘misuse’ buildings,” 27 per cent of Britain’s carbon emissions come from domestic buildings. That’s twice as much as emitted by commercial and public buildings, and five times as much as from industrial buildings.

The Government has already set a goal of making all new homes zero carbon by 2016. But almost all the 24 million existing buildings in the UK would need some refurbishment to reduce their emissions by just 40 per cent, according to Kevin Lomas of the University of Loughborough.

“To complete the task in 40 years we would need to refurbish an entire city the size of Cambridge every month,” Lomas said. “If we assume that each intervention would take a team of trained workers two weeks, we would need 23,000 teams of people to work at this rate non-stop for the next 500 months.”

Educating the public on how best to use energy-saving technologies is also vital, added David Shipworth of University College, London.

“Our research shows that there is a surprisingly poor relationship between reported thermostat settings and recorded temperature in people’s homes, and that timers on central heating systems tend to increase hours of heating system use rather than reduce them as policy makers have assumed,” Shipworth said.