Air Quality Matters
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Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#2.2 - Peter Rickaby: Lessons from Thamesmead in London and the Damp and Mould Crisis
Peter Rickaby - Part 2- Lessons from Thamesmead and the damp and mould crises
Now living in South Africa Peter is an Independent Energy and Sustainability Consultant working for the UK housing and building industries.
His influence on how we view energy in buildings, risk, retrofit and standards in the UK is wide-ranging and profound.
For 35 years from 1982 to 2017, Peter was a Director of Rickaby Thompson Associates, a specialist energy and sustainability consultancy with clients including three UK Government Departments, the Energy Saving Trust, the Building Research Establishment, National Energy Services, The Institute for Sustainability, the BBC and many more.
He contributed extensively to the industry-led Each Home Counts Review, where he was also a member of the Implementation Board
He chaired the BSI Retrofit Standards Task Group and was Technical Author of PAS 2035:2019 Retrofitting Dwellings for Improved Energy Efficiency: and PAS 2038 Retrofitting Non-Domestic Buildings for Energy Efficiency:
Peter's knowledge of how we understand risk in the built environment intrigues me, and I have seen first-hand how this has had profound effects on outcomes in the most challenging environments.
We discussed how our perspective of risk in both retrofit and moisture in buildings has developed over the last few decades, his career and the now famous Theamesmead project, the condensation damp and mould crisis of the last 12 months—ventilation, of course, and much more.
BSI White paper - Moisture Risk in Buildings https://sdfoundation.org.uk/downloads/BSI-White-Paper-Moisture-In-Buildings.PDF
BSI PAS 2035 https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/standards/pas-2035-2030/
Each Home Counts https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f1384e5274a2e8ab49f6b/Each_Home_Counts__December_2016_.pdf
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Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. This is part two of my conversation with Peter Riccobie. I'd like to talk to you about Thames Mead and we can get on to the ventilation and managing the conversation dampen mould part. But the other part that's interesting to Thames Mead for me is that development of a strategic approach to housing stock. And the interesting thing also about Thames Mead is, on one hand it's very unique as an area of London. It had some very specific challenges. But I think the lessons from that, certainly for me, have been much more wide ranging. I think it speaks to some of these core principles of strategy and risk management that both were developed for Paz2035. But I've taken on personally when I'm working with housing organisations and others about principles of strategy for ventilation and air quality, even Perhaps for people that don't know of Thames Mead, give a bit of background to what it is and then how you were first kind of engaged to look at the problem as we understood it to become the conversation dampen mould strategy.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, to summarise Thames Mead in simple terms, it's a big estate in South East London, two and a half thousand homes on it, built in the 1970s, so it's largely modernist. It's built of reinforced concrete and precast concrete panels. Those of you who know your films, it was the setting for A Clockwork Orange, stanley Kubrick's film. So if you've seen that film, you've seen Thames Mead. It has an interesting background. What happened was it was built with district heating to every flat and the place was the start of its life, was very warm, it was quite comfortable and when people were too hot they opened the windows to let the heat out and they paid for their heat the district heating to their flat in their rent. So opening the windows didn't impact them that much.
Speaker 2:Some time in the 1990s it was in that era of transfers in public housing it was transferred to a housing organisation called Gallions and Gallions were the landlords. But they were confronted by a problem, which was that the district heating was wearing out. The boiler plant needed replacing and the distribution system needed replacing, and they didn't have the resources to do that. So at around in around 2000, they decided to put an individual gas-fired combi boiler, a central heating system into every single flat and set out to do that, taking away the district heating. Unfortunately, immediately after 2000,. You may remember that fuel prices went up dramatically. There was a very steep rise in the early 2000s in domestic fuel costs and that left the people of Thames Mead who were low-income houses they were in social housing, low-income households caught because their fuel prices went up. They couldn't afford to keep their flats warm. They were responsible for their own gas bills and electricity bills by then. So they began to inevitably under heat and probably under ventilate, and within a few years the place was running well. It was riddled with mould, condensation, dampened mould, and about 10 years later Peabody took over, acquired Gallions, because Gallions was I'm not sure it was failing, but it wasn't doing very well. And that was the era when the housing regulators were encouraging housing organisations to merge, emerge and merge and become bigger and more corporate. So Peabody was encouraged and indeed was quite enthusiastic about acquiring Gallions and acquiring Thames Mead.
Speaker 2:In fact my old friend that I mentioned earlier, nick Wedlake, from Peabody, approached me around that time and said are we wise to acquire this place? A few of us had a look at it and I think our general conclusion, without saying it too explicitly, was probably not, you're taking on some big problems here and there. But eventually he came to me and he said we've got this estate. It's got loads of mould in it, not in every home, but in a very high proportion and we need to sort it out. And the good thing about it was that the Elizabeth Line what was it called Crossrail at that time was still under development but was terminating. It's south-west, south-east terminal was at Thames Mead, abbey Wood, and so they knew that the land values were going up and that they could buy more land around Thames Mead, build on it and sell those homes and use the money to improve Thames Mead.
Speaker 2:So what Nick said to me was we've got this plan, it's the 30-year plan. We're going to redevelop Thames Mead eventually, but meanwhile we've got all this mould and there are lots of households that we're not going to get to for 10, 15, maybe 20 years, and we can't leave these households with this state of mould. And so what he wanted to do was to find a way of eliminating the mould, mitigating fuel poverty with a relatively limited budget, and concentrate on the worst cases and concentrate on the properties that were not going to be dealt with for some time. So for me it was quite a big challenge and at that time I thought this is probably the last big challenge project of my career. I thought we were just going to do that and then I was going to say, right time for my pension.
Speaker 2:I went and had a look at it and, as it turned out, it wasn't the last project of my career because of all this each home count stuff that came along at the same time. But what I found was that it had I saw the worst mould I had seen in 30 years working in social housing. You've seen it yourself, simon. It was pretty bad in many cases. So we thought, okay, we had £2 million to do as much as we can in two years. In fact, in the end we spent £3 million in three years but nevertheless, compared with for two and a half thousand properties, that's not a big resource.
Speaker 2:So we knew that we had to take a systematic view and my experience of mould in social housing was that there wasn't really any theory of what you should do. People knew that ventilation ought to help. So most housing organisations attitude was if it's mouldy A, it's the tenants problem, because they're drying clothes on radiators and causing the problem, and B sticking a fan, and so you just install an extract fan in the kitchen, maybe one in the bathroom, and that ought to sort it, and of course it never did. There was no systematic approach, there was no theory, there was no well established technology that would deal with it. So what we did was we decided that we would look at the risk.
Speaker 1:And let me stop you there, peter, if I may because at this point I think it's a really interesting juncture to see how analogous this is to the current situation with condensation damper mould that we have in the UK. We discovered not on a specific estate but broadly in housing in general. We've got a very big problem with condensation damper mould. Those organisations that are tasked with dealing with it do not have the funds to fix everything. They're not going to get to everything in 10, 15, 20 years. So they're in a similar position right now, having probably just done their first round of stock condition surveys at scale to try and understand how big this problem is. They're in a similar position now that you were at the point you were just talking that you had this bigger state where there wasn't the funds to renovate and retrofit everything.
Speaker 1:There was an acceptance that this was going to take some time to sort out. So it required a certain strategic thinking to deal with the reality of the situation and answer a fundamental what next question? How do we make progress in an environment where we can't necessarily do everything we want to do? So I wanted to say that because I think it's a very interesting picture that you're painting, because I imagine many are in exactly the same boat, whether they're looking at a small estate that they can't afford to fix everything on, whether they're looking at their entire housing stock. It's a similar story, ultimately, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It is, and in fact, when we first, when Nick first came to me and said, would I look at Thames Meade from that point of view for them, I thought it was a one off. I thought this is just unique, it'll just be a one off project. And then, as we went on with the work, other estates around the country started popping up. We've got the same problems, and as we, as we talked about the work that we did, once we made some progress, more and more people popped up and then so I began to see that it was an endemic problem. It was. It's to do with years of work in social housing, with designs that weren't really appropriate in an industry that didn't really understand what the risks were and what the issues were, with residents who didn't really understand what the issues were and with landlords who didn't really understand it. We're all a bit ignorant about ventilation and conversation and more, and so when last year the fuel prices started to rocket in the UK and we had the the energy price crisis, it was fairly obvious to me, and I think probably to quite a few other people by then, that what was going to happen was people are going to start under heating and under ventilating, which is, of course, a guaranteed recipe for condensation, dampen, mold, and that's where we find ourselves really. And so what we need now to do is what you alluded to, which is to do a Thames Mead on every housing stock in the country. After the death of our Bishop, the intervention which I think in many ways was ridiculous by Michael Goh, the Secretary of State, basically said you guys have got to get a grip of this. We've given you no resources, no knowledge, nothing else for years and years, but you've got to sort this out. And he did what I thought was total, was possessed. He took some money away from our Bishop's landlord I think 2 million quid, a sort of punishment, whereas actually what all the housing associations need is given to be given more money in order to sort this problem out. And that was why we were immensely lucky at Thames Mead, because Nick had secured this 2 million pound budget and, although it wasn't as much as we needed, it was pretty rare to be given a budget to sort out a mold problem or to deal with ventilation. So that was one of the unique characteristics. The other unique characteristic at Thames Mead was they had very good data, because they just acquired Thames Mead from Gallions, they'd done a stock condition survey, a housing health and safety rating system survey, some retrofit surveys, some EPC surveys and there was a big database. So what we?
Speaker 2:I think I don't know where the idea came from, or I think originally. I think it was probably Nick who said you keep talking to me about risk and I've got a small budget and a big estate and a big problem can't we do some kind of risk assessment? And so what we developed was a way of assessing the risk of there being condensation, damp and mold in any given flat from the data without going there. And I had a colleague at that time in my office who did a tremendous job developing a risk assessment which scored every single flat and we did a few. We tried to do it without going there because we wanted to be able to use the organization's data. It admittedly has better data or had then than most housing organizations do now. So that's still a bit of an issue.
Speaker 2:But we did that assessment and one of the things we discovered was that there were certain things which were key drivers of condensation, damp and mold, and one of them was is anybody in the household employed? Another of them was is there a ventilation system in, and what type? Another one was how many people are in the place. We found that incidents of mold heavily correlated with over occupancy, which is a common thing in social housing. So even at the very first stage of the risk assessment we were learning what the potential drivers were. So we did this risk assessment and we managed to use all that data or collated into one big Excel workbook actually to score on a scale of sort of one to five what the risk of condensation, damp and mold and given dwelling was. We also did, we calibrated the risk assessment a bit so we did about 40 very detailed on the spot surveys where we surveyed all the ventilation equipment that was in there, every trickle vent, every fan, every control. We surveyed every room for condensation, damp and mold and collated it all into sort of graphic tables and that enabled us to have a degree of confidence that we calibrated the risk assessment right and we ended up with dividing this scale of one to five, which we had allocated a number to every dwelling, into high, medium and low risk, and that enables us to then say, okay, we've got a finite amount of money. How do we allocate our money, and it seems to me that in this case, risk assessment was about understanding how to prioritize scarce resources.
Speaker 2:So the low risk properties just got advice. Every household got two advice visits, actually from a specialist energy advisor. The medium risk properties got advice and they got an improvement to their heating system, if it could be achieved, so a better boiler, a more efficient boiler and a better control, better controls in the form of a switchy smart heating controller. And that switchy was very important because it was it also monitors the property. So we were able to see the effects of what interventions we made and we also used it to brief the advisors about each property. And then the third level, the highest risk level of risk. They got the advice, they got the heating improvements and they got a kind of top of the range ventilation system, a demand controlled CMEV system with the demand control focused on relative humidity within the within the property, and so we were able to allocate which property got which according to the risk assessment, and so it became the focus by which we deployed the resource.
Speaker 2:Notice that the measure, the intervention that everybody got was advice, and I can't understate how important the advice was. It was about getting the residents on our side, helping them to understand why they were getting condensation damper mould and how to deal with it, explaining the consequences of not ventilating properly, not heating properly, giving them a tool and then going back later and asking them how it was Is it working for you, is it too noisy, is it too expensive, do you find it easy to operate? And all those kind of things. We even asked them did the mould go away and did it come back next season? So the advice visits were absolutely critical and I would say that one of the key lessons is that you can't sort out mould problems without interacting in a positive and constructive way with the residents and giving them useful advice. They need to be on your side and, of course, in the wider stock as a whole, there's a very strong culture of it's a lifestyle issue if you've got mould in your house and it's your fault, and so, in the work we did subsequent to last year's fuel price crisis and starting to work on condensation damper mould in different housing stocks, we've always spent a lot of time trying to persuade the technical team, the surveyors and those kind of people the asset managers that it's not lifestyle. They can't go there and say it's your fault. They have to get the tenants on their side. They have to persuade them that they're going to work with them and they have to. The tenants are an integral part of this building, this house. The energy system includes the people and how they operate and how they behave. So advice is the key thing.
Speaker 2:I think the heating improvements were largely valuable because of the Tensmeade, were largely valuable because of the switches, which enables us to see what was going on in the house. The switching monitors internal temperature, relative humidity, outside temperature, outside humidity and lots of other things, and it feed it all back to a dashboard online that we could use. So it was very useful for seeing what was going on in the homes that hadn't been improved yet. It was also interesting, very useful for being able to see how the effects of the interventions we've made, including advice, had an effect, whether they were working and, of course, the ventilation systems, and also they were very useful also for briefing the energy advisers. We used to say to the energy advisers go and have a look at the switchy data about what's going on in this property, especially if it's had the intervention. You can see whether they're turning the fan off, you can see what temperature they're heating to, you can see what a house of heating they're putting in. So we brief them and then the energy advisers themselves I thought brilliantly said we're not just going to go and look at it before we go, we're going to take our laptop with this data on it to the house and show the people and have a conversation about it. And I went with some of the energy advisers on several occasions to try and see how it was going to observe, and it was a great mechanism. And the advisor would say well, I see that you turned the fan off three days ago and look what happened to the humidity in your flat, and so on. So the whole thing, the advice, the switchy thing was critical to the whole process.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, the top of the range intervention was the demand controlled CMEV, with RH relative humidity being the control parameter. And we learned lots of lessons from that too. And one of the things that we noticed from the survey calibration data was that homes with intermittent ventilation in them had mold, but homes with continuous ventilation in them mostly didn't. And so there was a lesson to start with, you need continuous ventilation to get rid of a mold problem. So that was useful.
Speaker 2:And then there was a whole dialogue about capacity where I proposed that the ventilation systems we put in had at least 125% of the minimum capacity in the building regulations for new build dwellings. And Nick Wedlake on his team from Peabody came back to me and said we don't agree with you. We think we should have 150%, because we've already shown that overoccupancy is highly correlated with the incidence of mold and every extra person is more breathing, more cooking, more washing, more bathing and so on, more drying clothes, more laundry. So they wanted us to increase the volume and, as you know, we then wrote a specification which said the ventilation system has to be continuous, it has to be demand controlled on the basis of internal relative humidity so the more humidities, the more ventilation you get and it has to have at least 150% of the capacity that's in the building regulations available to deal with any problems. And so those kind of lessons got built into the specs and we ended up putting exactly that kind of system into many hundreds of flats actually Flats of houses at Thamesmead and we learned all those lessons from it which subsequently it turned out it wasn't a one off. They're all over the place and there's still lessons that we're using now.
Speaker 2:In the last year I've been doing some training for three housing organisations in England and all those lessons are built into the training. We've been trying to teach them about all those things and get them to risk, assess their stocks, get them to prioritise their investment, get them to engage with occupants and give good advice, get them to put proper ventilation systems in and so on. So it's been. It was a seminal piece of work really, and it's been quite interesting to see how widespread the application of those principles is in sorting out these problems. It doesn't address they don't address the problem that most of the housing organisations out there at the moment with mould in their stock which I would vent, just as, yes, is probably all of them don't have the resource. They've never had the resource. The fact that we have two million pounds from Peabody seems like gold from heaven to them, but what they have to do is to think about how they can allocate the resources they have got on a risk basis over a longer period in order to deal with the problem.
Speaker 1:And build a business case for it, because you know, condensation damper mould doesn't come without its cost to housing organisations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the interesting thing about the tragedy was that the chief executive of the housing organisation lost his job and nothing focuses people's attention more than the fact, the risk that they might lose their jobs and in fact it was all the work I did over the last year for housing organisations was driven by chief executives and none of them said I'm worried about my job. They all said we've got this condensation problem, the mould, we've got to deal with it. But between the lines you could see that there was a strong nervousness there amongst housing management about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it became a governance issue. You know which boards have to deal with, you know. But again, it's a language they understand, which is risk, and I think what's interesting about Thamesmead and it's how it expands out to the wider ventilation and condensation damper mould problem is that it really leans on some basic principles. One of those is that it understood the four principle pillars of moisture balance, one being the fabric, the second being the systems like ventilation and heating, the third being the activity in the dwelling and the fourth being context.
Speaker 1:So, it's in Thamesmead case. We understood the context very well. It had a very specific context, we had a very specific fund. We had a problem to deal with. The activity in the dwelling was as much of a tool as it was a problem to be seen a tenant versus landlord because, as you said, it's about framing and communication and giving agency To tenants to deal with this problem alongside that process, but equally in the terms of the four C's, simon, it was coherence.
Speaker 2:Taking an all embracing, whole dwelling, including people, approach to the problem. It was the second of the four C's and then we did capacity, as we've described, and we did caution because we were we were trying not to take risks with these properties.
Speaker 1:So you're looking at a problem, and the first that there were principally three steps to strategy, and the first one is a proper diagnosis of the challenge, which you did. You understood the budget that you had, the risk that was presented in front of you, and you started to develop some guiding policies that dealt with the nature of the challenge. And one of those principle ones was look, we can't fix everything at once. We're not going to be able to deal with the fabric of these buildings, so that pillar is largely out for us. So what are we left with? We can't change the context of the situation. These are fuel-poor homes in homes that have been underinvested for long periods of time. There's not much we can do about that. So what are we left with? Well, we can engage with the activity in those buildings and bring people on side. And secondly, we have the systems that we can work with.
Speaker 1:Ventilation has an impact beyond just managing condensation damper molds and there are some win-wins there.
Speaker 1:But also a lot of those buildings were undergoing boiler replacements and boiler controls replacements anyway, so you're able to piggyback on some of that and provide some consistency of heat into those spaces, which obviously helps managing condensation.
Speaker 1:It was a great example for me anyway, and that's something that I've taken on that it shows, if you understand the nature of the challenge and it's in the best way possible, when you start to develop some coherent policies to deal with the nature of that challenge, then you start to actually create the standards and the procedures that meet the guiding policies.
Speaker 1:That's where you started to understand more deeply that not only that we needed to specify solutions that have capacity and robustness to deal with some of those things that we don't control the density of occupation and the harshness of the environment that they're going to have to work in but also for me and the biggest lesson I probably took away from that was that you could build commercial rigour into some of those strategies. That meant you started to ask for performance outcomes rather than just chuck a fan in a bathroom, like for like, and we'll rely on the supply chain to come up with the goods. And for me, that was a key learning from Thamesmead that you could actually ask the tough questions of the supply chain and say this is the performance outcome I want. You get paid when we achieve that. Is that okay? Yes, and that's a hard thing to ask.
Speaker 2:Well, let's come back to that in a moment because I think it's worth a bit of conversation there. But the other thing I think we learned was that we overturned the conventional wisdom. Twenty years ago the conventional wisdom in social housing to deal with conversation and mould was you have to do the insulation, the heating and the ventilation and if you don't do them all, it won't work. And I was taught that by some of my mentors. And actually what we showed at Thamesmead was that when it's too difficult and expensive to do the insulation, if you do the ventilation really well, you can still solve the problem.
Speaker 2:And one of the great outcomes from Thamesmead from my point of view was when we made the second advice visits. We asked people, has the mould come back? And we went and looked and we said have you ever turned the fans off, the ventilation system off? In no case had the mould come back the following season after we got rid of it and in only one case had the fan been turned off. And it was turned off because a kitchen fitter had been in and disconnected it and failed to reconnect it before he left. So you know the kind of great triumph for me was we managed to put a ventilation system in that people didn't ignore, didn't disable, understood the need for, and it took away the mould and the mould did not return the following winter. So that was the kind of the proof for me, if you like, of the fact that the strategy worked, what we were going to go back to remind me.
Speaker 1:I think, around developing commercial rigour and actually starting to demand certain outcomes from people.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:For example, you need an undercut under a door to provide air paths, and if that's not there, then that project isn't complete because it doesn't last. What the ventilation system is, if air has no way of moving from one room to another, it doesn't matter what you put in, it's not going to work. It typically was we can't take the door off. It's too old. If we take the door off, we're going to need to replace it, but that wasn't an excuse. The reality was, if you needed a good ventilation outcome, you needed an air path for air to move from one space to the other. So we had to develop strategies to work around that and work with contractors to deliver.
Speaker 2:And I think it was interesting because the general contractor for the terms we work was a well-known name and they were pretty good. I wouldn't say they were perfect, they were pretty good. One of your colleagues was the ventilation installation manager and he wouldn't sign off an installation until all the bits have been done. It wasn't just about these fans and ducts have to be in place, as you say, the door undercuts had to be there, the air inlets had to be there and working, all those kind of things, and actually the contractor did not get paid by Peabody until the ventilation manager had signed off the installation. And that was completely new for that contractor to be dependent on a subcontractor install, a supplier performing before they got paid for the job. And that for me was again a sort of cultural thing that maybe we need to think about the way we arrange contracts to make that happen properly.
Speaker 1:Indeed, it's one of the things we push forward and we see that to be fair now Sliding into the industry, certainly across Europe, with the development of things like independent ventilation inspections, to sign off on new builds but also major renovations, so that there is some third party checks that these systems are doing what they said they do. One thing to notice is that we do live in the real world and none of these things are perfect. One of the challenges we see with conversation dampen mold as we stand here today is that there's an expectation that this is going to be dealt with quite rightly, the death of our Ishaq has really brought that to the fore and there's a demand that this has got on top of. Anybody in the industry knows that this is a long-term problem. It's going to take a while to un-stitch, if it ever is.
Speaker 1:What's your thoughts and hopes for the next few years in this sector, particularly with moisture balance, about how we navigate the what next question? Because to recognise you've got a problem, sure, that's the first step of acceptance, right? And then I think it's fair to say a lot of organisations have at least a broad understanding of the scale of the problem that they have because of the surveys that they've had to do as a result of the crisis last winter, but we now move into a period of OK, what next? What does the roadmap look like? How do you see that playing out? What are your hopes for the sector in that regard?
Speaker 2:I have hopes and fears really. I mean I think, well, I know our Ishaq was not the first child to die of mould in UK housing and he won't be the last. And in fact we only had the whole thing brought to our attention by the diligence and energy of one coroner who spent two years trying to really understand why he died and what the problem was. So it takes some people pushing hard to get even bring the problem to our attention. I think my view of the next five years is that we have to get into a position where we understand conversation, dampen mould and particularly ventilation to support, to deal with it much better than we have in the past. And I don't mean when I say we, I mean housing organisations, particularly their technical teams, and residents as well, and the contractors and stallers who generally maintain our housing stocks for us, framework contractors and so on, because the level of understanding is very poor. And if you're a resident, you see the ventilation as something that makes an annoying noise. It draws your attention to it. And when your attention has been drawn to it you think, ah, that's costing me money. It's an electric fan and I'm having great difficulty paying my fuel bill, so I'm going to switch that fan off and that all comes from a complete lack of understanding on the part of the residents of why, how the problem is. You know what the nature of the problem is. Of course it's bound up with things like how you dry clothes and whether you open windows when you're cooking and all those kind of things. But basically we need to educate residents much better than we do.
Speaker 2:We need to educate housing maintenance teams much better than we do, and during my work with some housing organisations during the early part of 2023, I realised that there are kind of two groups of people, two generations of technical people in a lot of housing organisations. There's an older generation of surveyors who go out there and who basically say it's their problem, it's lifestyle, and they go away from a visit to a home in response to a complaint about moulds saying, well, it's your fault, or leaving the impression with the residents that it's their fault and that they need to do something, and that's what the Housing Ombudsman's report said has to stop. But the other generation in several of the housing organisations I've went to is a younger group. In one of them, there was a group of six management trainees who had been taken on and scattered across the organisation. But they got themselves together and said we're going to be the condensation dampen mould task force and each of us, in a different part of the organisation, can contribute some knowledge, understanding and policy and analysis to this problem. And they were much more up for it's not much more up for we can fix this compared to their older colleagues, which is we've had that problem for 30 years. Nothing works. It's all the residents problem.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, we have to change the culture, but I think we can see that happening. Secondly, we have to improve everyone's knowledge of moisture balance, as you say, what causes it to occur, and a ventilation systems. I, during those visits to housing organisations, had on several occasions arrived a few days after the positive input ventilation guides had been along and sold them a couple of million quids worth of positive ventilation systems as the best things in slice bed for solving their condensation problem. And you and I know that that is not right. It's a highly risky solution and when we came to that part of the training that I was delivering that said this is what a good ventilation system looked like. Those organisations were horrified at the decisions they'd recently made about ventilation, which I said was not the appropriate system.
Speaker 2:So I think we have to get that level of knowledge up and we have to be convincing about it. They have to have confidence that we, those of us who are doing the training or persuading or helping with the policy or the strategy, do know what we're talking about. We have to get the engagement to work. So the whole of condensation at the moment is in the complaints box and if it doesn't get sorted it ends up with a disrepair claim. And there are lots of lawyers who just make their living out of almost catalyzing disrepair claim among social housing tenants because of condensation and mould and then, if it doesn't go that way, it goes to the ombudsman and that's completely the wrong place for that whole problem to be. That problem needs to be properly managed within the organisation on the basis of risk assessment, good technical policies, good engagement with residents, and so we've got another of these cultural changes to deliver in the next five years.
Speaker 1:And I think that goes to the point I was making that we don't live in a perfect world and a good case study does not make a strategic change for an organisation. So even with Thamesmead, for example, with all the lessons that were learnt on that project, we've still seen elements of that area defaulting back to the way it used to be done. Yes, when you can't achieve a plan A, the point of plan B isn't to just throw everything away and go back to what you used to do. Plan B should be a reassessment of the risk and understanding how you're going to meet the same performance criteria, but with a different choice or a different angle.
Speaker 1:And that's a really hard lesson is that we can try very, very hard to develop these case studies. So this is a systemic thing within organizations. You can lose a champion like Nick Wedlake out of an organization when they move on and you're left with a void. And if you haven't changed the system, you can find yourself talking to that organization two years down the road as if nothing's been learned. You know, and you're starting again.
Speaker 2:You made another point to me a couple of days ago about how things also improve. I was pretty scathingly critical about the ventilation industry a few minutes ago, but actually you reminded me a couple of days ago that you know fans have improved. For instance, at Thames Meade we used centralized mechanical extract ventilation because the decentralized funds were basically no good at that time. They couldn't deliver the volumes and capacities we wanted and they weren't quiet enough. Well, in fact those bits of kit have improved dramatically in the last five years and I think if we went back to Thames Meade or we went to any of these other landlords doing something similar, we would probably seriously consider decentralized MEV these days as if, especially if there's not much money. So it's also important that we keep up to date and we allow the industry to respond to the challenges we're presenting them, even if it takes them a while to be persuaded and to do the development work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the important thing about a strategy is that the strategy doesn't change. The guiding policies inform specification and product selection, but the policy remains the same. You want to deliver a certain amount of air to a building. It needs a certain amount of capacity, it needs to respond in a certain way to conditions. That doesn't have to change. The fact that the industry has moved on over five years is a benefit, because now we have more choices to meet that guidance policy and sometimes better kit as well.
Speaker 1:not just more choice, but sometimes better kit, yeah, and training might have improved and supply chains might have improved. So like it is hard when you're sat, like us, within the storm. It can seem like everything takes forever to change, but actually there has been some pretty significant changes.
Speaker 2:I was going to say I would finally put into the pot on this training, because actually a handful of consultants can't handle this problem. It's too big. So we have to get to a point where lots of people in the ventilation industry, in the technical consultancy industry, in the housing industry, understand the problem as well as we do, in order that they can autonomously or independently get on with it. And there's always a tendency to try and keep a monopoly of things, but I think it's going to be really important that everybody understands ventilation better.
Speaker 2:One of the things I said at the end, going back to the beginning of the talk, at the end of Retrofit for the Future, one of the things I concluded about ventilation was that in Retrofit for the Future, where we put those 86 odd systems in, the most of the ventilation systems were poorly conceived, poorly designed, poorly installed, poorly commissioned, poorly maintained and poorly operated.
Speaker 2:In other words, we really didn't understand ventilation as a nation, let alone as an industry, and I think in many ways we've been trying to redress those positions ever since and we have to keep going with that because actually I think people in Europe, for example, understand why you need ventilation much better between the UK and it's a historical thing. It's to do with the fact that we've traditionally had leaky buildings in the benign climate and we could get by with reasonably healthy ventilation just by allowing the buildings to leak under the pressure of the wind. And actually in many parts of Europe that's not been possible, particularly in the winter, and we're beginning, as we make our buildings tighter, we're beginning to understand that in the UK as well. So I think that lessons on the way, but it's part of a bigger learning that we need to facilitate, I think.
Speaker 1:You mentioned earlier that one of the things that came out of the housing ombudsman was it's not a lifestyle, and I think that's been a significant shift in thinking, both of the regulators and the ombudsman's perspective, but also now for the housing associations to consider that we have to create buildings that meet people's lifestyle within reason. But there is an argument and I'd be interested to get your perspective on it, speaking to housing organisations that the dial has moved too far the other direction, and sometimes it is lifestyle, sometimes it is occupant interaction and the risk of the dial moving too far.
Speaker 1:The other way is that you remove the agency from the tenant's perspective of being a key stakeholder in the outcomes of air quality in their own home.
Speaker 2:I think you're completely right. I tried to indicate when we were talking about Thamesmead that actually the residents are part of the team. They're not part of the problem, they're part of the solution. And you also said a few months ago that you don't want to try and change or constrain people's lifestyles, and I am completely in agreement with that.
Speaker 2:Homes are for people to use the way they want to use them. But what we need to do is to get them to help us so that they understand that they've got kit that will keep their home healthy and safe and that they know how to use it to keep their home healthy and safe. And therefore, engagement with the residents in a really constructive way and not treating them as though they don't know what they're talking about, but treating them as though they've got an investment to make in this and they've got a contribution to make, is critical to the process. And actually I think that's a lesson for energy efficiency in general, not just for ventilation and condensation down for mould. You can't do energy efficient housing of any kind unless the people who are going to live in it are signed up to what you're trying to achieve and understand how you're trying to achieve it. So for me it's a truism, if you like that the people are the most important bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost as if it's us against building. Physics is ultimately what this is about, but whether you're a designer or a contractor or an occupier of a building, we're all in the same boat. We all want a good outcome, but neither is going to be successful without the other.
Speaker 2:That it's a process of stakeholder against building physics basically, yes, you know lots of people will say that dealing with a stakeholder is a challenge. I would say that particularly in red fit not so much in new build but particularly in red fit the building physics is a challenge because a lot of those buildings have got pretty awful building physics, you know, no insulation, lots of thermal bypass and thermal bridging and so on. So we have to absolutely as you say, we have to bring the building physics and the people together into some kind of synergy. It's an ecosystem which involves the people and the envelope and the systems.
Speaker 1:And, of course, one thing we've been talking about a lot today is social housing, but that's only a fraction of our built environment. You know, we haven't really discussed the private rented sector or even the owner-occupier sector, and arguably some of those have bigger problems than the social housing sector. At least the social housing sector has housing ombudsman and regulators for social housing and organisations whose job it is to take care of the buildings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of people aren't so lucky.
Speaker 2:Yes, they have landlords in social housing, which is, I suppose, why we've sort of attacked that system, that sector. First, you know they have landlords who we can get at and can do things like risk assessments and investment plans and technical strategies and so on. I think the 68% of the UK housing stock which is owner-occupied is a much more of a challenge on the human bit end of that balance we were talking about, because we have, whatever it is, 18 million of them to persuade and get on our side and we can't. We don't have landlords to go through, if you see what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very true.
Speaker 2:And that means better education in lots of places actually.
Speaker 1:Look, peter, thanks very much for your time today. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. As always, it's been fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks a billion and we'll talk again soon.
