GBRC

Well, things looked promising as sat down for our movie shortlisting session.

The premise of our televised online debate between the Energy Minister Greg Barker, Grand Designs front man Kevin McCloud and several leading industry representatives was "The Green Deal: One Year and counting".

When filling out an application form recently I felt somewhat discombobulated when it came to the 'occupation' entry. Property developer or environmental campaigner? Environmental campaigner or property developer? They don't at first glance seem to marry particularly well. But they do, thankfully. Absolutely and utterly.

Linking up government policy and practice can oftentimes be tricky. In the home refurbishment arena, pioneering low energy retrofits are pretty few and far between across the UK and getting them promoted to an appreciative political audience is a thankless task in the high-octane circus that is the media cycle.

Some would say it pales in comparison to recent government revelations about civil servants getting sent on chocolate-making jollies, but recently the Great British Refurb team got to visit our sponsor Knauf Insulation's mammoth factory at Cwmbran, South Wales.

To have any chance of meeting challenging carbon reduction targets the government has set down in law we need to have done a full energy overhaul of over seven million homes across the country by 2020 (on top of continual programmes of low level work like loft and cavity wall insulation). As it stands, we’ve done about a hundred. And therein lies the scale of the challenge. One hundred to seven million in a decade. Oh, and the other 19 million homes will need to be tackled in the decades after that.

The rapidity with which we need to overhaul the home energy sector is immense. We need access to cheap finance, skilled builders and a whole raft of other things if we are to have any chance of ensuring the UK's existing homes get the energy efficiency makeover they need. But the current state of play is that government don’t seem to have grasped the extent of the challenge. 

So what were the questions that they had to to answer? Do you want a house that is more comfortable, which has lower running costs and is kinder to the planet? And by the way, do you want this to be something which everyone across the country could have without having to put their hand in their pocket for cash? A pleasant proposition and one which WWF supporter Rebecca Williams was happy to say yes to in agreeing to let the Great British Refurb campaign team do an energy makeover on her house.

While progress is being made across the country in topping up loft insulation and filling cavity walls, her Victorian mid-terrace in inner city Manchester is typical of one of the 8 million UK homes that simply have no cavities to fill. And it's one of the 9 million with a suspended wooden floor lacking insulation. Without getting too techy, this makes them a little bit trickier to deal with, and on occasion a lot more expensive to fix (as explained in the solid wall insulation blog).