Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
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The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#2.1 - Peter Rickaby: Navigating risk in Retrofit, Damp & Mould and the Role of Ventilation
Peter Rickaby - Part 1- Risk in retrofit, moisture balance, standards and more.
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 to Air Quality Matters, and this is a conversation with Peter Rickaby, now living in South Africa. He is an independent energy and sustainability consultant working in the UK housing and building industries. An honorary senior research fellow at University College London and a member of the management team for the UK Centre of Moisture in Buildings. A registered architect since 1979 and completing his PhD in energy studies, peter's 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. Clients included three UK government departments, the Energy Savings Trust, the Building Research Establishment, national Energy Services, the Institute for Sustainability, the BBC and a wide range of local authorities, housing associations, housebuilders, architects and the list goes on. Peter led the development and delivery of the acclaimed retrofit coordinator training for the Centre of Refurbishment. Excellence 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 charged with the development of a framework of technical standards for the support of the implementation of each home counts. He was also the technical author of PAS2035, retrofit dwellings for improved energy efficiency and PAS2038 retrofit non-domestic buildings for energy efficiency.
Speaker 1:Peter's knowledge of how we understand risk in the built environment intrigues me, and I've seen firsthand how this has a profound effect 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 Thamesmead project, the condensation damper, mold crisis of the last 12 months, ventilation, of course, and much more. Thank you so much for listening. This is Peter Rikabee. What I wanted to ask you about, peter, was most of the buildings that stand today are going to be in service in 20 or 30 years time and beyond, and particularly in the context of Europe and the UK's aging housing stock and in the context of renovation and retrofit. This is a really complex landscape and with complexity comes risk Risk. We haven't always managed very well in the past. How do you even start to unpack that risk and build something that can handle it?
Speaker 2:Well, it is a huge challenge, as you say. I'm minded of a colleague of mine, john Willoughby, who said that if you look at any one year, 0.3% of the emissions associated with buildings come from new ones built that year and the other 99.7% come from the existing stock. So there's a huge challenge, and it's clearly far more important to deal with the existing buildings than it is with the new ones. But we don't really know very much about it. We weren't until about 20 years ago. We weren't doing very much in the way of systematic energy retrofit, and so we had to learn, and it's taken us 15 or 20 years to understand what the risks are, how to manage them and then how to set them into, how to embed them, if you like, or code them into building regulations, into standards for processes, into training and all those different things.
Speaker 2:And it's taken so long because it's completely new for the building industry. The industry has been used to getting a greenfield site, maybe a bit muddy, building a building on it and then one day, a few months down the line, handing over the keys to whoever's going to live or work there. But in fact, retrofit's all about doing stuff around people. The people are. We're talking about people's homes and the places they work, maybe both. In there, they have themselves, their children, their pets, their possessions, and it's probably likely to be one of the most important places and investments in their life. So we have to learn how to operate the retrofit processes in that context, and that's why it's taken us so long to understand what can go wrong and how to stop it going wrong and to engage all the people that we need to engage, including the residents of the buildings, the occupants.
Speaker 1:And how did that journey start over the last kind of 15 and 20 years, figuring out that actually we might not be getting all of this right?
Speaker 2:Well, there have been disasters along the way, but for me it started at the end of the 20, zeros, the 20, whatever you call them the noughties, and where we had a program called Retrofit for the Future in the UK where 115 houses in 86 projects were retrofitted to a pretty deep standard. They were all housing association houses and they were all occupied, and then they were monitored to death for two years post construction reviews, post occupancy evaluation, instrumented monitoring and so on. And I was lucky enough not only to have participated in a couple of those projects but also to be on the technical panel that evaluated everything for two or three years afterwards. And so that was a really good start, really starting to understand what could go wrong, why it could go wrong, what the risks were, and by the time we'd written the report, it was an innovate UK program, what used to be called the Technology Strategy Report and they produced a good report. But one of the things I'd learned along the way was that actually Retrofit is risky and there are technical risks and they're mostly to do with moisture. So After that work was done we were still by that stage I and my colleagues were working on other retrofit projects and I started to work at the Centre of Refurbishment Excellents, core, where we originally met, and there we started to systematically say, well, what are these risks, how do you characterise them?
Speaker 2:What's the mitigation?
Speaker 2:And we started to make charts and tables of how to do that and that was the basic laying down of the groundwork to help us to understand what would be involved in managing risks, and all the kind of billing, regulations and standards and processes and guidance and things like that are laid on top of that foundation. So we started with some very crude charts and tables. Really, one of my earliest lessons was most of those risks are moisture-related and at that time our late colleague, neil May, who was the founder of the UK Centre for Moisture and Buildings, was quite active in trying to understand moisture risks associated with buildings, and so we put our heads together quite a lot over the following years in order to try and bring a systematic approach. Neil wrote a seminal paper with Chris Sanders about dealing with moisture risk in buildings. It was a BSI British Standards Institute and white paper and it became a kind of Bible for us in understanding how to manage those moisture risks. Once we got them mapped out, what was the process for understanding them properly and mitigating them.
Speaker 1:For people that haven't read that document. It's still floating around, I think, on a few portals. I'll try and share a link in the podcast notes for people to go and access it. But I think what stopped a lot of people in their tracks when they read that document, and why it became such a Bible for a lot of people, was it started to talk in first principles themes around moisture balance and some of the core systems that have an impact on moisture balance in buildings.
Speaker 1:So we started to see, for example, the development of the four Cs around moisture risk Maybe, perhaps expand for people just a little bit about that document and some of the kind of first principles ideas that it started to develop and get down on paper, because it's a very long way from a regulation or even a BSI standard, but it developed a lot of the language we see in some of those standards today, didn't it?
Speaker 2:Yes, Well, the white paper was deliberately called a white paper by BSI because it was a kind of call to arms on moisture in buildings and most of the work that went into it came from Neil and Chris and from one or two colleagues at the UK Centre for Moisture in Buildings at University College London, valentina Marin-Joanie for example and they did a lot of work and put it down in a kind of academic paper. It's really an academic paper but not published by UCL but published by BSI, and it became the starting point for a sort of first campaign and then later the process of updating BS British Standard 5250, which was at that time the standard for moisture in buildings and for dealing with condensation in buildings, as it was entitled. But it was actually deemed by most of the people working at UK C&B and in other parts of and on moisture issues in other parts of the world as not really adequate. It didn't deal with the problems properly and we'd learned a lot since it was first written. So in fact BS5250 did get updated about three years ago and it was largely the material in the white paper that underpinned that update and brought it up to date.
Speaker 2:And the four C's, for example, were kind of rules of thumb. Context understand the context of the building. What's it? Coherence make sure your approach is technical, coherent, technical, coherent across all the aspects energy, moisture, and so on. Caution was one of the others, caution being that this is a whole area that we don't know as much as we should about. So proceed with caution, and so on.
Speaker 2:And capacity which we'll come on to later, I think, which has always been one of my personal favourites.
Speaker 2:I think Sure, and I'm saving that for when we talk about tens of minutes actually. So we had these four C's and they became the kind of structural pillars of an approach to moisture risk management in buildings and still are. They found their way into BS5250, they underpinned quite a lot of the work I did in the last few years and they, although not explicitly included in the red-foot standards that I've been writing, they were actually the underpinning foundations there as well. So quite important work and Neil May was quite an important person in this process of understanding risks in red-foot. I think without him we wouldn't be half as far away forward as we are now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I completely agree and, as somebody that knew him well, Peter, he was a special character, wasn't he? Because he was unusual. He was a philosopher, he was a builder, he was a it's hard to call him an academic, but he really was an academic as well. It was quite a unique mix of skills and insight.
Speaker 2:He was, and I remember talking to colleagues at UCL about him and discovering that they found him both an irritant and an inspiration, because he questioned everything and he did the same in the industry, so that what he was doing out there was bringing his approach to philosophy and his approach to building. He was a builder. In fact, he always looked as though he'd just come from a building site. He always had a sort of Guernsey sweater and big boots on and I used to think, oh, he's just come from doing some plumbing In fact, far from it, very likely. But he was kind of every man's man. He fitted in with everyone, he got on with everyone, he inspired lots of people. So I think he's due a lot of the credit for whatever progress we've made in this field.
Speaker 1:And I think that background, that deep thinking that he obviously had and his closeness to the supply chain, I think was what enabled him to join so many of those dots when coming up with concepts like the moisture paper, because he could see beyond the regulation or beyond an academic outcome.
Speaker 1:He wanted to understand how you could create tools that tradespeople could dip into and use in a meaningful way. So I think that all designers, or what we now call retrofit coordinators, could manage risk in a slightly more joined up fashion than perhaps we'd approached it before with regulation.
Speaker 2:Yes, I remember Neil once said perhaps to finish off on Neil that academics should strive to make their work more useful, but practitioners should pay more attention to what academics say. So he had both sides of the argument.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very true. And I suppose at the same time that that paper was being developed, we also saw quite a seminal piece of work going on at a standard and legislation level around each home counts and the Bonfield review. So by that time we'd already started to see some of the mistakes that we'd been making in successive retrofit programs and green deals and a range of other things you were involved with that, weren't you, in the each home counts and Bonfield review.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think there were 10 work streams in the each home counts review and I worked on about four of them, but I was also a member of the implementation board for a couple of years. At the end of the process, I think each home counts was more a coming together of things than a seminal event, in the sense that While we were learning about retrofit from retrofit for the future and from the work at core while we were trying to understand the risks and how to manage them, the industry was happily going along causing disasters. And it was partly industry because they didn't know what they were doing, and it was partly government because they were pouring money into programs to retrofit people's homes which were very poorly informed, very poorly conceived, and the two came together with a few completely spectacular disasters more impressed, and that people listeners may have may have heard about, where nearly 300 homes were pretty much ruined by bad retrofit, but lots and lots of others. At one point I remember the civil servant responsible for responding to complaints to the department about retrofit damaged people's homes said that there'd been far too many of them and both he and the minister didn't want to write any more letters in response. So what were we going to do about it, and that was eventually ended up with setting up each home counts, which was in many ways a response to problems, and so the attempt was to bring in the knowledge we'd learned from different directions, and I have to say that it was an interesting process, because those of us who'd been trying to learn about retrofit risks and how to manage them found that the industry, which was making quite a lot of money out of these government funded ways of damaging people's homes, was very reluctant to listen, and so there were, in the first part of the review, quite a combative environment in which the industry's position was there's no problem, we could just get on with it. Why do we need a review? Why do? Why? Might we need standards or regulation or guidance or anything else? And the people with the expertise were saying, well, actually it's all going wrong, and the politicians were saying, yes, it is so.
Speaker 2:Once we got everybody facing in the same direction, it then became a way of, if you like, collating what we knew and thinking about how to code it into things like standards and guidance and processes and quality assurance mechanisms and codes of conduct and customer charters and all the things that came out of it. So we had a review with 27, I think, recommendations. I was, by that time, as the report was published, I was the co-lead on technical standards and three of those 27 recommendations were about technical standards and that led into working on those standards and we, working with BSI, we developed a suite, what we call the retro standards framework, which was designed to bring the best existing standards into into play, alongside new standards, to deal with new problems we'd learned had emerged and to create a framework that the industry could use alongside regulatory mechanisms like a quality mark run by trust mark and codes of conduct and so on, in order that things were supposed to well, in order to make things or promote things going in a smoother way from that time onwards. In fact, that work the review was published in December 2016, I think, and that work probably took five years before all the bits were in place and we were able to say, okay, we now have a quality assurance system for retro work or other kinds of work renewable energy, on, on or in people's homes in the UK.
Speaker 2:So it was quite a long haul and it was quite difficult at times, not so much technically, because I think we knew what we were doing but it was difficult, as it were, changing the course of the super tanker, making the industry think in a different way about risk and respond with it with new, by adopting new processes. So it's quite an important report. It took us to a place where we knew we wanted to go, but it was to do really as much with people as with the risks. Persuading people to do things in a different way, persuading industry that working in people's homes was not the same as working on building sites, and all those kind of issues being kind of what's the word?
Speaker 1:embraced by the industry to do things differently and theoretically better and that's one of the the principle reasons why I was so interested in having you on, peter, is because I think the lessons that you've learned and the lessons that were learned through that process are so applicable across the built environment, and none more so in ventilation and air quality, that I think it's fair to say. And in the majority of the cases, we know what we're doing technically with buildings. We know how to build an energy efficient, nearly zero energy building or a passive house building. We know how to build very low energy retrofits. We know how to do retrofit at scale. We know how to do modular construction. We know how to innovate in this sector.
Speaker 1:But time and time again we see things falling down, not because of a lack of knowledge that's out there. It's how you manage processes and risk and you engage and you frame, and that's as applicable to ventilation and air quality, as it is the the journey that you went on with retrofit back then. I think if you were looking back at the bondfield review or I keep saying the bondfield review and each home, each home counts for people that don't know either, they're basically the same thing. Bond field was the chap that headed the review initially and the each home counts was the report, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:yes, well, peter bondfield was the director of the chief executive BRE at that time, but he'd been doing several other reviews. He did a review in the food industry, for instance. So after we called it the bondfield review, people started saying which one field review? So then it became every home matters and somebody wrote in and said no, we've got that, that's trademarked, you can't do that. So we actually ended up with each home counts. You're right actually that you know the ventilation is at the center of it. I remember on my, my first session of the each home counts implementation board, peter bondfield kind of welcomed me and then he pointed a thick finger at me and he said I've got three things to say to you ventilation, ventilation and ventilation. And that was his. Basically. He said if you can sort that out, we can do well.
Speaker 2:And in fact the, the retrofit industry such as it, was that well, the, the people who had been involved in retrofit for the future, had a saying which was no insulation without ventilation. It was very commonplace to say that in professional context and so on. Actually, all right, it comes from an expression invented for the American War of Independence, where they used to say no taxation without representation, to stop George the third taxing them for importing stuff to the colonies, and it lost us, the American colonies. So we just took over their expression and changed it around for retrofit in the 20th century. But it was when, later on, when after each home counts, and in response to the recommendations, we came to write the first of the standards of what we call PAS 2035. Pas 2035 for domestic retrofit.
Speaker 2:The hardest thing to achieve was to persuade the industry to do ventilation when they insulated that, to get over the message that when you insulate the fabric of a building and you make it more airtight, you reduce the infiltration rate and you're likely to reduce the air quality, and therefore you have to assess and, if necessary, upgrade the ventilation.
Speaker 2:That's a very simple concept which of course, we're very familiar with, but it was a really tough thing for the insulation industry to embrace because of course they were used to sticking insulation on walls, they weren't used to installing ventilation systems and they weren't used to explaining them, specifying them, procuring them, installing them or any of those other things. So we had a very long battle, a year long battle, to get not only some ventilation but the right ventilation into that standard in order that we could take away the risk of poor internal air quality, condensation and mould arising from retrofit, and nothing could be worse than having your home retrofitted to make it more energy efficient, and then finally that's running with condensation and mould. So it was a critical battle which we eventually sort of won.
Speaker 1:I think we could have, we could have done better, but we sort of won and where do you think that level of insight came from someone like Peter Bonfield, that that was something that was clearly on his mind when he spoke to you and beyond him? Then what kind of resistance did you see from industry to ventilation was it conceptual around the need for it, the costs associated with it, the competencies that they needed to deal with it? I'll be interested on both takes because, for somebody like Peter.
Speaker 1:Bonfield, who clearly wasn't a construction expert, necessarily, or ventilation expert anyway. Um, he had the insight to see the importance of ventilation early on. And yet when you get into the, the weeds of the, the supply chain, who should see the need for it, there's resistance. Yes, well.
Speaker 2:I think that the technical community around BRE and Peter Bonfield's organisation and around the Association for Environment Constituent's building, for example, had well understood the need for the need for ventilation through their own experiments and pioneering work over more than 10 years. I would say so, in the technical community, in the community of consultants that I was part of, it was well established no insulation without ventilation. And we knew why. However, the industry was well, it is still fragmented into people who deliver different organizations that deliver different measures. So we were mostly trying to get an industry of insulation installers mostly small, mostly who did one type of insulation walls, roofs or floors, or maybe they did windows and use government money and there were quotas for how many they had to deliver and there were maximum. In fact, it wasn't government money, it was money from the energy companies mandated by the government, but there were maximum costs for all the measures. And we come along and say, right, oh, by the way, you have to do ventilation now. And they said, well, where's the money coming from? From the ventilation? And we don't have the skills, we don't understand ventilation, we don't have a procurement chain, we have a supply chain for it. We don't understand how to design it and so on. So we were talking to them about, well, how do you pair up with the ventilation company and what kind of ventilation is appropriate.
Speaker 2:And then the ventilation industry, I have to say, wasn't very helpful itself, because the ventilation industry at that time and still to some extent, was focused on delivering ventilation equipment that delivered the minimum ventilation rate set out in the building regulations for new homes, not for retrofit, and you and I both know that you need different ventilation rates in retrofit on many occasions. And there also, it was also an industry where it tended to lose interest in its products the moment they went out of the factory gate on the back of a truck. There wasn't much interest in, well, how do you design the system, how do you install it, how do you commission it, how do you maintain it, how do you teach the people in the homes the best way to use it, and also about the consequences of not using it, disabling it or turning it off. And so the industry was, I think, way behind us.
Speaker 2:We had the wrong products, poorly supported, and it took a very long time. It's still taking a long time to get the right products out there, and I would argue that today we have better products. Definitely, and some of them are better for retrofit than what we started with. But we still haven't differentiated the ventilation industry and its products into stuff for new build, with much more determinable parameters and environments to work in, and stuff for retrofit, which might mean things like much different ventilation rates, much different capacities, much different kinds of controls and so on. So we're still on that journey, I think, with the ventilation industry.
Speaker 1:I think that's probably fair to say, and it's the difference between an industry that's set up to sell products and an industry that's set up to sell an outcome. Yes, and that shift to an outcome is a very important shift in mindset. Yes, that takes a little while or a long while depending on the industry or what you're selling.
Speaker 1:To move to and to be fair to the industry. The bottom line is is if you're selling a 30-quid fan over a trade counter, there's very little margin to care about outcomes with that product. Sure, you know that product is very, very important. You know that product's been beaten down to within an inch of its life from a cost perspective. It's not designed for follow-up and rigor and competency. It's designed to sell as many as humanly possible with as least effort as possible. And the industry would say that they'd spent years helping to develop competency schemes, for example. But they weren't competency schemes really aimed at outcomes. They were. It was a sticking plaster really to a gap, that where ventilation didn't really have a trade and there was a recognition.
Speaker 1:There's a notifiable service. Really that you needed some level of skill, but it didn't really deal with the problem and certainly wasn't aimed at retrofit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have an interesting anecdote about that, which was that to do with the housing organization Peabody, where the sustainability manager was a good friend of mine called Nick Wedlake and he asked me to help him because he found that in their new build developments they were building 12,000 units a year at that time. This is about 2013. The biggest source of callbacks and complaints and requirements to go in and fix things was the ventilation systems, and Nick got quite frustrated with their three or four big companies that were selling them fans basically and he said I want to call them in and I want them to be encouraged to do things like take more interest after the stuff's gone outside the factory gate. So he called them in one by one, each the big four, and had me there in the meeting and what he said was I don't want to buy ventilation kit from you anymore. I want to buy ventilation, I want to specify the air quality I want in all our homes for the next 30 years and I want to give you a contract to supply it. And you do everything you design it, manufacture it, supply it, install it, commission it, maintain it and explain it to the residents.
Speaker 2:And they all went pale, and nearly every one of them said, oh, we couldn't possibly do that. We have board decisions that just, we just supply things. But they went away and over the next three years or so Attitude started to change and some companies you know the ones started to take an interest in well, what actually are we giving these people? What does this service look like? We haven't got quite as far yet as ventilation as a service, but we have got much further along the line of engaging the ventilation companies with the whole process from one end to the other.
Speaker 1:I wanted to swing back to something you said earlier because I think it's an important context to set, particularly for the UK, and I think it also lends itself to ventilation and air quality more broadly anyway. And that was when you were talking about the industry responding to the retrofit challenge and you had individual companies delivering individual measures across the board under various different schemes and one of the breakdowns in quality was not having a joined up approach there. So we'd commonly understand that in UK parlance as single measures, and I think single measures is a really interesting concept, just to unpack a little bit because it's realistically how a lot of the built environment gets improved and maintained over time. But you have to develop frameworks to manage that risk because it's a reality, isn't it? It is.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that's one of these great dilemmas in UK retrofit, that all the techie people on all the risk management people say you do whole dwelling retrofit and all the government programs say you deliver one measure at a time and they're all in separately funded programs and all of the each home cancer review. Well, a large amount of each home cancer review and of the lessons from retrofit for the future were about actually retrofit goes wrong the corners, junctions and edges, where one element meets another element, where you get thermal bridging or thermal bypass, where the floor meets the wall meets the window meets the roof, and the interfaces between the building fabric, the building services. Are they well matched and the people do? They know how to use these things? And all that joined upness led us to the view from each home counts that it had to be whole dwelling retrofit. The objection to which, of course, is that nobody, or hardly anybody, whether there would be a landlord or an owner occupier, can afford to retrofit their home to say, 2050 zero carbon standard all in one go. It just can't be done. Most of them don't have that some those sums of money available, with a few obvious exception, the consequence was that we had this in the standards we wrote.
Speaker 2:We built in the process whereby you should assess where you want, where you are now, assess the building, assess where you want to be in 2050 and create a staged process in sort of affordable bites for getting from one to the other, and that seemed to us to be quite a kind of sound, logical process. Of course, if your industry is set is consisting of lots and lots of small organizations, each of which deliver one measure, it's hopeless. And so we've had to since each come home counts start to promote the development of installers and retrofit companies and contractors who do multiple measures. And the difference was starkly illustrated by David Adams, ex Wilmot Dixon, very well known retrofitter, who said that you know, bad retrofit is when Mrs Smith has her house retrofitted and there are six measures and on six different days. You have to take a day off work and a van comes with a bunch of people in it to install one measure and over the six days they never meet each other. But the good retrofit is when a bigger van comes and it stays for six days and it's got more guys in it who may all be specialists in individual measures but who work together to install all the measures in one package and they deal with the interactions, they deal with the joining up, and what we want to do is to move the industry from a myriad of little installers of one measure who, by the way, also have a commercial interest in selling you their measure and not potentially the best measure for the house.
Speaker 2:So there's another problem with that and we want to move that from one where there are retrofit contractors, as we're now starting to call them, who bring on installers and subcontractors and take responsibility for the whole dwelling approach, even if it's staged. And the PAS 2035 standard requires a staged medium term retrofit plan for each dwelling or dwelling type. And my experience is that you never really need more than three of the most four stages to get you to where you want to be in 2050. So it's not like lots of little stages, it's some carefully considered planning and it allows you to build in all the work that Bob Pruitt, for example, did on sequencing retrofit what things go together, what things must come before other things and what things can block stuff in the future. So the staged approach it's difficult for the industry, requires a kind of culture shift, but it's fairly critical to getting it right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it starts to deal with the reality of how this happens. You know that this work is going on in the UK, as it is in every country in Europe, and everybody's learning their own lessons and realizing that there is an idea of a one-stop shop, a single coordinated retrofit that takes the house from A to B and deals with most of it in one go. But that's a very specific set of the market that's capable of doing that at one time. You've got government funding for major renovation and retrofit that may feed into that. In the UK we've got the likes of the SHDF funding, for example.
Speaker 1:In Ireland, where I'm from, we've got major funding for major renovations of buildings and programs, but at the same time we also have to capture the life stages and life cycles that people go through and the opportunities that are open to them to conduct these measures at certain times, and also in the building's life cycle as well. We have to be able to capture that. So there is this balance which I think you try to capture in PAS2035, with different types of risk streams and different types of competencies and journeys and requirements.
Speaker 2:Well, there is work that has been done by lots of people actually about what we call trigger points. Why do people do retrofit and when and there are all sorts of occasions when their family expands, or when their family gets smaller because the kids leave, or when they inherit some money from a parent, or when they change jobs and have to move, and all these trigger points are then what we need to do is to build what's to be done at each trigger point into a coherent plan that takes the entire stock of the UK 27 million homes to net zero by 2050. And so it's quite a critical process and it's got to be part of it. And I have to say that I don't think even the UK government has signed up to it yet. They are still promoting single measures programs. They are still using the excuse that people can't afford to do whole dwelling retrofit to promote single measures programs. They are still giving the industry targets in this form of numbers of installations to do or amounts of carbon to save, instead of setting up programs which deliver planned whole dwelling retrofit over a period.
Speaker 2:It's obviously quite difficult for governments, because governments have a sort of stride of about five years and then they tend to change and civil servants tend to say in their jobs about three to five years and also change. So the biggest cultural problem has actually been with government in the civil service, getting them to understand that that's the way we need to do it and change the way they go about things. And the dreaded treasury is always there saying how many installations are you going to do this year and how much carbon are you going to save this year? And so what we're finding is that the technical standards, the sort of good practice, best practice processes that we've been setting up around whole dwelling retrofit, just collide with the treasury, who just want to know how many are you going to do this year? How many installations of an insulation measure, for example, are you going to do this year? And we're still not winning that battle. I have to say We've got the standard in place, but it's not really understood at government level.
Speaker 1:I think it was. One of the key steps that was taken in Ireland was to tie funding of things like retrofit programs to a carbon tax and start to develop a ring fenced funding mechanism that could turn into multi-annual funding for these types of schemes and developments over the longer term. Don't get me wrong. It took them a little while to get there and the island, like the UK, had years and years and years of stop-start funding. Stop-start funding and rushes to get claims in and then the work done and then get paid and you'd lose skills and labour in the process. People would scale to deal with a fund and then lose those people over six or nine months and have to build. It was an absolute nightmare, but now at least there's that consistency, I think.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, I think we're slowly getting there. In the UK I call it the don't get fooled again syndrome, with a slight nod to the Rolling Stones. So many people were persuaded to invest in some training or some equipment or some staff to deliver some government program and then got cut three years down the line or changed significantly, and it's made a lot of people in the industry quite cynical about being encouraged to go in the right direction because they say you might encourage me to go this way, but in three years time you're going to tell me something different. And so again, that's a government civil service type problem. We have to take a longer view of this problem if we're going to do it right.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think you're absolutely right, and sometimes when you're in the storm, these things can seem like they're taking a very long time, but the reality was less than a decade ago. From a ventilation perspective anyway, ventilation wasn't really even mentioned in standards and coser practice. It certainly wasn't funded, because the reality is ventilation very rarely helps the targets from the departments that this funding is coming from, which is principally energy saving, because nothing beats no ventilation for energy savings.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, so adding more air exchange into a building doesn't exactly help you meet your carbon saving targets.
Speaker 2:Makes it hard. Yeah, indeed, so like, even if you're looking at fuel poverty, it's the same thing. Those fans are using electricity and therefore costing money. I think in support of the Irish programme. The Irish standards SR54 for retrofit had ventilation before the UK did in it, so Ireland led the way in that respect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, indeed yeah. There was a bit of a flip-flop over the years between Irish and UK standards, kind of improving on each iteration, which I think is quite good, and SR54 is being redone again now. So I think hopefully we'll learn some lessons from some of the standards and protocols that have been developed in the UK. Coming to you for a second, peter, as you said earlier, I first met you back in the call days centre of refurbishment excellence. I didn't say how long ago that was now, but that's about 10 years, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah, perhaps explain to people a little bit how you ended up specifically in this field.
Speaker 2:Sure well, I qualified as an architect in Cambridge in the 70s and by the end of the 70s we were setting up a practice and I thought that probably I was going to design buildings for the rest of my career the way architects do. Actually, in the first vacation of my first year in Cambridge I read Paul Ehrlich's book Population, resources and Environment Paul and Anna Ehrlich, actually and I became an environmentalist that Christmas and from then on I was only really interested in building, making buildings better, perform better, because it seemed to me that Lots of my colleagues, students and long-term friends as architects were interested in great designs, in design with the capital D, making a name as architects, and I thought, well, if the buildings don't perform and if the buildings can't do their bit in saving us from climate change, which was just sort of emerging as an issue, then what's the point? So I started my practice mostly as an energy consultant. So we became energy and sustainability consultants and we mostly worked in new build and a lot in housing for the first 15 or so years of our work, of our career. And then people like John Willoughby were talking about the existing stock and how important it was. I kind of had a road to Damascus episode at that point and thought well, when will? This is mad, we shouldn't be worrying about the new builds, they're almost unnecessary, we should be dealing with the existing stock. And so I refocused our work and did quite a lot of work on retrofit, which led to the retrofit for the future involvement, which itself then led to the Chunkounts review and so on.
Speaker 2:And so the last 20 years of my career, which is pretty much over now I'm pretty much retired, but well, struggling to retire people don't seem to want to let me but the last 20 years or so I've been mostly focused on retrofit and mostly, but not entirely, on domestic retrofit. And there's a small community of us who, whose consultancy work and whose research work, overlapping, really have been that way. So I not only got involved with retrofit for the future and each home counts but I joined the UK Centre for Moisture and Buildings at UCL in a sort of part time role which was to do what they called engagement and impact try to take the work of the UK Centre, the academic work, out to the industry and also bring back what the industry needed to the research. So I did that for a while and then, after the Chunkounts review, I'd been co-lead on technical standards with Claire Price from BSI, who's the BSI's Building Sector Lead, and she asked me to chair the BSI Retrofit Standards Task Group, which is still in existence. I'm no longer the chair, but I did stay there for six years as the chair and what we were tasked with doing was building a framework of retrofit standards for the UK, embracing both existing and new standards, and that was the task really set for us by each home counts. So I ran that group for quite a long time and it's a great group actually, because it has 20 to 25 real technical experts, unlike most BSI committees which are populated by representatives of bits of industry and people who are mandated to say what the boss tells them to say.
Speaker 2:We recruited a whole load of technical experts in their own right on the basis of their expertise, so they had much more freedom to say what they thought. And that's recently become a bit of a bone of contention because it's not a model that BSI is used to, but it was a very powerful mechanism for establishing the case for doing the retrofit standards we've done. Once we got that going, we had a new standard to write PAS 2035, and an existing standard, which is the installation standard for retrofit PAS 2032 update and I became the technical author for both of those and we did two iterations of PAS 2030 and one iteration of PAS 2035, which was published as the first edition PAS 2035, 2019. And then I subsequently have been stepping back, so I handed over the technical authorship to a colleague, Sarah Price, and I've recently handed over the chair of the RSTG to Alex Baines, and so I'm slowly disengaging now. But that whole activity of understanding, creating, managing risk in retrofit through standards and codes and so on was my main focus for most of the last 15 years.
