GBRC

I spent Friday at the Radian Retrofit Conference. A fantastic event, absolutely jammed to the rafters with well over 350 people all focused on retrofit. Various experts spoke, Chris Huhne laid out his vision for the Green Deal and we all swapped ideas and concerns. However, at the end of the day, I was left with one, big nagging worry.

I had a very fun morning talking about the Great British Refurb to the British Institute of Interior Designers.

As you must have noticed, we almost always focus on energy efficiency. But a truly sustainable house is about more than insulation or PVs. It is about water use (you can read our water blog) and the materials we choose to use. Read Colin’s blog on why forests matter – from Bourne to Borneo

I talk about insulation a lot. Perhaps I'm just getting older, or geekier or sadder. Perhaps all those are true but its also true that low carbon homes are the hottest environmental topic of the moment, and while insulation is far from the whole picture it is a massive part of it.

The election is providing an interesting backdrop to our week at Grand Designs Live. The Great British Refurb campaign is here amongst the solar panels and sliding door exhibits to get thousands of people to support us in lobbying the new government on policies to support a mass low carbon retrofit of UK's homes.

One of the first questions I was asked from a couple who came over to the stand was- 'how can you be planning to lobby a government when you don't know who it's going to be yet?' Fair question. There are lots we don’t know and even after May 6th it will be a few weeks till we know exactly what we're dealing with but there's one opportunity we have no matter what happens with the election.

Whether the new government's motivation is reducing householders bills, protecting against expected energy price rises, meeting the UK's climate change targets or stimulating the UK's economy, kicking off a mass homes retrofit programme should be high on the list of anyone in their first year in office. There's no other big way of tackling climate change that is likely to be as popular with voters, that requires no new technological inventions and can be well underway within the first phase of a new government. In essence how this plays out will tell you how serious the new government is about climate change- if they don't seize the opportunity with a mass homes retrofit then I, for one, will be pretty concerned about how they're going to manage to make the UK a low carbon economy. However if our new government does launch a great british refurb plan in the first year they may find the thousands of people we're speaking to this week ready to take part.