Government urged to help homes go green

Ashley Seager
The Guardian,
Monday October 13 2008

The government must urgently begin improvements to make Britain's 25m homes more energy efficient if it is to reduce the UK's carbon footprint by 80% by 2050, a report says today.
The report, by the Green Building Council (GBC), says some homes are so environmentally harmful that they may have to be demolished. It also wants the government to introduce a system of "green mortgages" to pay for improvements such as new windows and boilers.
All new homes must be zero-carbon from 2016, but campaigners say that older houses must be a priority, as they account for around a quarter of the total carbon emissions.
One of the report's key ideas is a "pay as you save" system, where the homeowner or landlord borrows the costs of improvements such as new windows and insulation from a bank or local authority, and then pays the money back over a number of years, with the costs more than covered by lower energy bills.
"Government intervention is needed to create a market for low-carbon homes and industry is crying out for that certainty," said Paul King, head of the GBC. "This needs a fundamentally new way of financing energy efficiency in the years to come that virtually eliminates up-front costs to the consumer.
"We've been throwing our money out of the window. Spiralling fuel costs and concern about climate change now call for a revolution in attitude and approach."
The report says that the improvements are "absolutely doable," and could unlock tens of thousands of "green-collar" refurbishment jobs in a market worth £5bn.