Give landlords cash to cut carbon, government told

18.07.08

By Mark Jansen

Select committee of MPs, LandSecs’ Salway and Sir David King recommend incentive scheme

The government should introduce cash incentives to improve the energy efficiency of Britain’s commercial buildings, a committee of MPs has concluded.

The committee also called for the Building Regulations to be progressively tightened to raise energy-efficiency standards and for the wider introduction of display energy certificates.

The report of the All Party Urban Development Group was launched on Wednesday by Francis Salway, president of the British Property Federation and chief executive of Land Securities, together with Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the government.

The report, Greening UK Cities’ Buildings, said the cost of refitting properties to make them greener is often prohibitive. Landlords have little incentive to make the investment when rents and values are unlikely to rise as a result, while energy costs are still too low in relation to tenants’ overall occupation costs to induce them to cut consumption.

The report makes eight recommendations:

• It calls on the government to create a ‘one-stop shop’ to deliver energy-efficiency policies and information coherently

• Owners and occupiers should be given clear advice on how to make easy energy savings

• The government must lead by example. A study by the National Audit Office, published in April last year, found that only 9% of the governments’ new buildings and refurbishments met its own sustainability targets

• There should be a single standard for measuring a building’s energy performance

• A national database should be compiled to compare the energy performance of buildings in use with their initial design assumptions.

• Display energy certificates, which show a building’s energy usage and will be compulsory for large public sector sites from October, should also apply to commercial buildings. Energy performance certificates, which were introduced for commercial buildings in April, only show what the design is capable of

• Building regulations on energy efficiency should be tightened to force changes in behaviour

• Trading standards officers given clear guidance to ensure that the regulations are enforce.

The report concludes that ‘there is scope to consider … a range of fiscal incentives and grants to retrofit buildings and help owners deal with upfront costs’.

The committee of MPs based its report on oral and written evidence given by a range of property industry sources. A spokesman for the All Party Urban Development Group said: ‘The readiness of the private sector to give evidence for this report shows that it is willing to work with the government, but we need a clear vision on how to go forward.’