Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast. I’m Kieran Findlay, the editor of Scottish Housing News, and with me as always is Dundee’s former housing convener, Jimmy Black.

As building regulations rightly call for homes to be as energy efficient as possible, it makes sense for an approach to be adopted which prioritises the thermal performance of a property right from conception. Improve the fabric of a home first and lessen the need for expensive low carbon energy sources later.

Jimmy Black

However, does this approach work for improving existing buildings? In the rush towards meeting Scotland’s net zero challenge, is the convenience of a one-size-fits-all approach actually holding us back from achieving our requirements in an efficient and cost-effective manner?

Fionn Stevenson certainly thinks so. And with more than 30 years of experience in sustainable design and 120 scientific publications to her name, her opinion carries some weight.

Kieran Findlay

In her extensive career, Fionn has spent 10 years as Professor of Sustainable Design at the University of Sheffield and co-authored the first “Sustainable Housing Design Guide for Scotland” in 2000, which was republished again in 2007, while she was here in Dundee, where I’m glad to say she joins us now.

Fionn Stevenson

Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

Kieran Findlay

Here, where did your housing journey start then?

Fionn Stevenson

Ohh gosh. Well, I’ll take us back to 1981 when I was a young 21-year-old. I’d just graduated and my very first job was down in London when I applied to become a short-life housing manager. Not a small job, but the job basically involved inspecting big old hotels in Earls Court that were temporarily empty and that belonged to local housing associations. Housing associations like Octavia Hill Housing Association, London & Quadrant Housing Association and basically these hotels were going to lie empty for anything up to five years and we as a local charity called Nucleus had an arrangement with the housing associations that we would do a short-life management of these properties, house the homeless, make sure the properties were wind and watertight and safe.

And that meant that, you know, we as a charity could charge minimal rent. And it was a time when the Rachman landlord situation was really awful in London and we had a lot of young Scottish gay men coming down to Earls Court quickly finding themselves homeless or finding themselves being really ripped off paying hundreds and hundreds of pounds a week or handing benefits for hundreds and hundreds of pounds a week to rogue landlords. So that was a real eye-opener for me and it started me on my journey into social housing.

Kieran Findlay

I’m already recognising something that Councillor Allan Casey from Glasgow City Council told us in the last episode of the podcast, which they were looking at emergency accommodation in former offices and so with the hotel situation that you said there’s certainly struck a chord. Do you see this coming back full circle?

Fionn Stevenson

I think that we are needing of necessity to move into more of a make do and mend culture. I don’t mean that as a regressive step. I mean that as something that’s to do with the concept of sufficiency. So we talk a lot in housing about energy efficiency or resource efficiency but the idea of efficiency is a relative one. So you can have a really efficient house that is actually using an awful lot of energy because it’s a very big house. Whereas if you look at the total energy that a house uses or the total amount of materials that a house uses, for me, that’s a much better measure and when you get into looking at using housing stock sufficiently rather than efficiently, you have to maximise and sweat everything you can get your hands on. Everything that already exists. Because anything that we do new is going to create more carbon emissions.

Jimmy Black

OK, but now we’re at the beginning of a revolutionary change, if you like, in social housing because it’s going from old fossil fuel-powered systems, gas boilers and storage heaters, the old kind of storage heaters, to this brave new world of air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, district heat networks. And plus all the fabric first measures of the insulation, the external wall insulation, the internal wall insulation and schemes like the Logie scheme in Dundee, a very historic scheme where they can’t do it on the outside and masses of stuff here. It’s got new stuff that’s going to get added to the existing housing, but surely we have to do that if we’re going to meet the energy targets set by the Scottish Government and stop climate change.

Fionn Stevenson

I want to reframe the debate quite a lot. So the first reframing I’ve done is to talk about sufficiency rather than efficiency. So with the net zero targets, I mean, if we take, for example, the latest consultations on heat in buildings or the net zero for social housing, the way the government is framing the debate is in terms of efficiency, and so they’re framing it in terms of kilowatt hours per metre squared per year. But that is a relative figure. So it’s a moving target. So it doesn’t actually deal with the totality of how much resource or how much energy we’re actually using, it’s at a rate of use.

We need to get much more knowledgeable about the total amount of carbon emissions we’re creating or the total amount of energy that we’re using. And the thing that makes it very difficult to talk about sufficiency rather than efficiency is that the whole framing of the government, social housing, energy efficiency debate is around energy in use. Now the bit that’s missing is the embodied energy, or the embodied carbon, and at the moment the housing industry, both private and social housing developers, are all on a mission to make. To do more to make more, to make more new houses, to make retrofit. And the problem with the making is every time we make we add more carbon emissions. So at the moment, people haven’t got the full picture. We don’t have legislation that compels the housing industry to look at the embodied carbon emissions, and that’s all the carbon emissions that are created, all the energy that’s used to actually make any changes, against the efficiency in use.

That is, I can’t tell you how big an earthquake that will be for the housing sector when that legislation comes in, and it will come in. It’s coming. It’s on its way. There’s been a lot of debate down south in England, in London, at Westminster. Probably more debate down there than up here in Scotland to be honest. I mean usually Scotland’s in the lead on green affairs. But I would say at the moment on this embodied energy argument, the debates more down south, ironically. So it is coming our way and there is already software out there to help housing associations look at whole-life costing which looks at how much carbon emissions, how much energy you’re using to create your changes compared to how much are you saving in reality and it’s that equation that’s really not happening in the housing world.

Jimmy Black

Can we take some practical examples and try and work out how that comes into practice?

Fionn Stevenson

Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s really important.

Jimmy Black

Well, I was going to give you one.

Fionn Stevenson

Oh, fine, go ahead.

Jimmy Black

Well, North Lanarkshire are demolishing something like 5,000 multi-storey flats over a period of time and they’re replacing them with new build houses. I’m not aware that they’ve done a carbon calculation. Maybe they did. I know that when we in Dundee demolished the number of multi-storey flats, the carbon cost was never counted, at least not that I recall. So should we be thinking about that before we decide to demolish any kind of property?

Fionn Stevenson

Absolutely, that’s a really good example actually. I mean, I’ll confess when I worked in Glasgow in the early 90s, I did witness the demolition of the Queen Elizabeth flats in the Gorbals and I was actually involved in the demolition of multi-storey high rise in Roystonhill, and at that time, I was of a different opinion. I was very much with the social impact of actually demolishing the high rise, replacing it with low-level housing and everything that we bought into. I was only just beginning then to become aware of the embodied carbon issue. And in fact, I did my first embodied carbon study in 1992, in Scotland, on energy efficiency measures for social housing, for the Scottish Government. But way back then, I mean that was over 30 years ago, it was a voice in the wilderness. Today it’s just about to become mainstream.

So the example I would use as a practical example is in retrofit. So if you take a series of options like insulation, external or internal insulation. Let’s look at air source heat pumps, solar PV, new windows, draught-proofing, each of those has an efficiency factor that we talk about, but each of them also has an embodied carbon cost that we don’t talk about. So for example, if we drill right down to insulation, we often have a choice about whether we can externally insulate or internally insulate. If you look at the embodied carbon cost of the equivalent amount of insulation that you would put on externally compared to internally, you’ll find that the external system has more embodied carbon.

Again, if you look at the sweet spot for how much insulation you should retrofit on a house that doesn’t have any insulation, let’s take a typical hard-to-insulate solid wall house, for example, you know, tenements, Victorian tenements. If you look at that, there’s one part of the industry saying, well, we should ram in as much insulation as we can because that’s really going to help the residents. But actually, the amount of embodied carbon that you’ve got in putting that insulation in, if you put too much in, the payback on that compared to how much you’re saving in terms of efficiency, it can easily be, you know, 6, 10, 15 years, depending on how much you put in.

There is actually a kind of sweet spot which is around about 100 millimetres and that’s been researched by people down in London called LETI who have written a retrofit guide that I would recommend to listeners. LETI have actually looked at the sweet spot and it comes out at around about 100 ml for a solid wall, so anything over that and you’re creating a problem.

Jimmy Black

OK. But, all of this change. It’s about climate change. It’s about zero carbon. But anyone in social housing, and I know that you’re involved in social housing at the moment as well, will tell you that the crucial thing, the sweet spot, has to take account of the rent which you charge tenants because the tenants can’t afford to pay higher rents. And equally, they can’t afford to pay higher fuel bills so that if you don’t do the insulation that the building requires to give them a decent fuel bill, then you’re letting them down. So it’s always going to be attractive to housing managers to put that warm woolly jumper around the house and put in all the gubbins that they can.

Fionn Stevenson

I want to challenge that.

Jimmy Black

Go ahead.

Fionn Stevenson

Yeah, I do want to challenge that because I understand that comfort instinct and I understand in social housing we all want to get rid of fuel poverty and we all want our tenants to be comfortable but I’m going to go back to the make do and mend and I might not be popular with the social housing movement but we are in an emergency. We’ve just had the hottest year on record last year. We had four and a half thousand deaths in the UK from overheating in 2022. Four and a half thousand from overheating not from cold.

Kieran Findlay

In Scotland?

Fionn Stevenson

In the UK. Yeah, I mean this was obviously because we had temperatures of 40°C in in London. Yeah. Which is when we got the wildfires. At the moment we’re suffering from a boiled frog syndrome, which is where we we keep being told there’s an emergency, but we keep not really feeling it until our house gets flooded or set on fire by a wildfire.

And I want to put that level of emergency, which is the increased flooding, and ask ourselves, all of us to ask ourselves if we have a choice between a tenant having their home flooded or having to put on an extra jumper, which would you recommend? Now where I’m going with this is, again it’s the framing of the debate on retrofit and a lot of it is to do with modelling, computer modelling, and how we make decisions about what measures to put in.

So for keeping our tenants warm, there are parameters. Now in the old building regulations, the old building regulation was for a bedroom 18°C. What is it today? We are always modelling at 21. 21 is the new mantra. How did that happen? How did we creep up 3° within the housing industry? And what does that three degrees mean in terms of carbon emissions? It’s enormous. If you think of the whole of Scotland, not just the social but also the private, everybody moving up heating by three degrees, when the government itself is constantly asking people to turn their thermostats down by 1°.

That’s the kind of reframing we’ve got to do. And it’s painful because as human beings we’re sitting in here in the studio and you know, I’ve got my woollen jacket on my thermal underwear, my woollen trousers on and my thermal underwear under that. I’m probably too warm in here. But, you know, I dress in layers. I’ve taken off a woollen jumper here. I dress in layers. Now what I tend to see in the social housing movement is that we get this one-size-fits-all approach because we want to be quote-unquote ‘efficient’ and we tend to work to the always to the lowest denominator. So instead of having them make do and mend, we say well who are our most vulnerable? And the most vulnerable will be the elderly, the disabled, people in fuel poverty, and we then worked to the margin of who are the most vulnerable in terms of what condition do we need to heat them to? And it will be 21 or if it’s in sheltered housing, they’ll whack it up to 27.

Whereas having an adult conversation with the people in the home and saying “look I know you like going around in a t-shirt in winter, but do you know what? You will find if you wear four layers of clothing in the winter, you will be able to keep that thermostat down a little bit lower”.

Jimmy Black

The only way we can control what people use is by the fabric that we create, the heating system we put in. We can’t monitor people’s use of their thermostats.

Fionn Stevenson

That’s a good point. That’s a good point.

Jimmy Black

So what difference does it make?

Fionn Stevenson

It makes a huge difference because the reframing that I’m talking about is all about education. I supervised a PhD a couple of years ago and the student the researcher was a retired CEO of social housing association Connect Housing in Yorkshire, Jenny Brierley, and she did a fantastic PhD on ventilation in social housing and it was to look at the tenants’ perspective and the maintenance perspective and the development worker’s perspective and what we found was that there was a real lack of training within the sector, a real lack of training and understanding around ventilation.

And so for me, we had the Tony Blair mantra in 1997 of education, education, education. And for me, the mantra today is training, training, training and I have to say, the housing associations I’ve worked with both in England and in Scotland, whether as a board member or a researcher or as an architect, I still see training as a Cinderella.

Whether it’s toolbox training for the guys on the job, or the training of the CEO, it’s still not upfront. And with the climate emergency, that training has to happen in order to turn the juggernaut of one-size-fits-all around.

Kieran Findlay

So on this one-size-fits-all approach. In my introduction, I paraphrased a post that you published on LinkedIn a couple of months ago now where you more directly put it that fabric first as a blanket approach to retrofit is not always the best option. Some properties will do better with cheaper renewable energy heating options without the expensive faff of additional external wall insulation.

Fionn Stevenson

Absolutely

Kieran Findlay

And that we need to tackle the low-hanging fruit first. In the case of existing homes in Scotland, what does low-hanging fruit look like? Where should housing providers look for their easy pickings?

Jimmy Black

And I should say that there’s at least one housing manager who thinks the low-hanging fruit has gone. We’ve done it already.

Fionn Stevenson

Yeah. Well, I’d love to have a conversation with that housing manager and I’d love to take him round his stock and the first thing I’d ask him is, how well is he surveying his stock? And another thing that we need to reframe and I’m gonna shamelessly plug my book here at the moment.

Kieran Findlay

Crack on.

Fionn Stevenson

I realise that one of the reasons we live in La La Land quite often as social housing providers is ‘rubbish in rubbish out’ on modelling. Whether it’s new build housing or retrofit housing, we rely on the models. EPC is a complete waste of time. I have been in charge of a research project that reviewed 200 EPCs and I don’t mean EPCs, individual EPCs, I mean on schemes so you know, there were two hundred schemes where EPCs were reviewed. All of them were wrong. All of them were wrong. They were either overestimating or underestimating. Then you look at RdSAP. Terrible. Now the governments recognise this and they’re gonna bring in fabric energy efficiency with the new net zero consultation for social housing, so that that’ll be a good thing.

But that’s only one end of the spectrum. One end of the spectrum is you have to survey your properties properly. I’ll get to the low-hanging fruit in a minute, but you can’t do low-hanging fruit unless… you can’t manage what you don’t measure, nd measuring is not modelling. Measuring is going out there with your computer and actually doing the infrared survey.

Kieran Findlay

So in terms of the education, the training, that’s where you’d start first?

Fionn Stevenson

Well, that’s why I wrote the book. So the book is called Housing Fit For Purpose: Performance, Feedback and Learning. And I wrote it about four, four or five years ago now, it’s still current and it was to educate housing providers in how to properly evaluate the genuine performance of their stock.

Jimmy Black

Cloning, I mean, people do maybe have two or three hundred houses that are all the same, so they clone them is that good enough?

Fionn Stevenson

No, that’s the worst thing you can do. Cloning. You’ve actually got to think of housing as dentistry, it’s an analogy I’ve used elsewhere, but every home is actually unique. Now, I appreciate we can’t survey every home, but we can certainly do more sample surveying and the archetypes are a good idea. You know, having housing archetypes where you say, OK, let’s pick the low-hanging fruit not as a 1 size fits all, but let’s look at the Georgian stuff, we’ve got a few Georgian houses, what are we going to do there?

Well, right now, Hillcrest Housing Association, where I’m a board member on the maintenance, they actually recognise that one size doesn’t fit all and they are going out to some stock and saying, well look, it’s actually going to be really difficult to put insulation on this stock. This is Georgina and it’s got massive windows. It’s got a tiny wall-to-window ratio. Let’s target the low-hanging fruit rather than doing the full package, let’s go for the windows first. Yeah, so the low-hanging fruit is not about excluding other options. It’s about saying let’s take a sequence of measures. Let’s start with the stuff we can do easily, which doesn’t necessarily preclude other stuff.

You make sure you design it so you don’t preclude being able to do more later, but I would certainly say to your chap who says we’ve got all the low-hanging fruit, I’d say two things. I’d say one go and re-inspect your stock and have a look at how much of that draught proof proofing you’ve done was actually done properly.

Jimmy Black

Now that’s that’s the thing that the low-hanging fruit could be defined in various ways. Nigel Banks, I think he’s called, of Octopus Energy has been writing about this. And he says there are four things you do before you put in fabric improvements. Let’s see if I can get them right. The first one he puts forward is air source heat pumps. And that’s a surprise because that wouldn’t strike me as the first thing you would do.

Fionn Stevenson

Yeah. Well, I know Nigel quite well. And I’ve got a lot of time for him because I think he is a future thinker and I think he’s also quite realistic. The air source heat pump debate has been hijacked and it’s been very much hijacked by the fossil fuel industry. So there’s a lot of misinformation and there are a lot of vested interest in seeing air source heat pump not succeed. This always happens with new technology. It’s always, you have to get through that teething problem. So there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the performance of air source heat pumps. There are a lot of myths that need to be busted. I again, with some of my previous research, with colleagues in Oxford, we looked at air source heat pumps and yes, back in 2004, 20 years ago, air source heat pumps that said they had a coefficient of four were only producing a coefficient of two.

That was 20 years ago, but that’s what people remember. A lot of people in the industry remember that. We’ve moved on 20 years. We have now got state-of-the-art air source heat pumps that have coefficients of up to six or seven. That means they’re producing six times more efficient electricity, or seven times more efficient, than, say, a standard gas boiler that doesn’t even achieve 100%.

Kieran Findlay

This misinformation does seem to be working. The Climate Change Committee report even today has suggested that the installation of heat pumps needs rapidly increased. It’s failing at the moment.

Fionn Stevenson

Yes. No, I think the misinformation has done terrible damage. And I mean, the reason why Nigel is saying look at the air source heat pump first is that in some situations and again, it’s always horses for courses and it’s always dentistry and it’s archetypes and it’s taking an intelligent look at our stock and saying from street to street, from housing type to housing type, let’s look at all the different measures that we could apply, and let’s see it as a smorgasbord. What’s the best recipe for each house? Not even for each street, for each house. What is the best recipe? You have to verify. You have to check reality. So he’s right with air source heat pumps in some houses where you’ve got a lot of difficult external detailing, for example, on old stock where you’ve got tricky details around the windows you’ve got like the LinkedIn post I showed the photograph where they carefully insulated around the external lintel causing thermal bridges.

Where it’s going to be really difficult to resolve things like thermal bridges, then an air source heat pump can be a much simpler solution because what it does is it gives you a steady state heat source that will give you 100% clean energy in use, not the embodied carbon, but 100% clean carbon energy in use.

The big thing that’s really throwing us at the moment is people saying, but if we, the myth, if we put a gas boiler in, that’s going to be cheaper to run than an air source heat pump. Not true. It depends on the make of the air source heat pump and it depends on its coefficient. Gas prices at the moment are four times cheaper than electric. Yeah, but if you have a air source heat pump with a coefficient of five.

Jimmy Black

Then you’re winning.

Fionn Stevenson

Then you’re winning.

Jimmy Black

Some of the other things that he mentioned, one was draught-proofing. Just simple draught-proofing measures.

Fionn Stevenson

Yes, yes.

Jimmy Black

Another was cavity wall insulation, which is a bit more major.

Fionn Stevenson

Roof insulation?

Jimmy Black

Roof insulation he absolutely mentioned and he mentioned tariffs, smart tariffs which made me go and look at my own tariffs and try work out, there are new tariffs that are available I wasn’t aware of and one of them is one that tracks the market and you actually pay the cost of the energy in that specific day. But for people with air source heat pumps and other things, then there are special tariffs for that.

Fionn Stevenson

I’ve got a bit of an issue with tariffs.

Jimmy Black

Tell us more because that’s the low-hanging fruit.

Fionn Stevenson

Yeah, well, I think tariffs is a tricky one. I mean, I think tariffs favour the producers rather than the consumers and I’ll explain why in a minute. But just to go before we get back to tariffs, I just want to pick up on those other four. Nine million homes still need more roof insulation. That is astonishing, because your chap who says we’ve done all the low-hanging fruit, I’m sure he’s assuming that all his stock has got a decent amount of roof insulation and I’ll guarantee it hasn’t. I’ll take him up into his lofts and I’ll show him where the workmen have pulled back the insulation in order to rewire or replumb, and I’ll show him that probably 50% of his stock, the installations being mucked about with and it’s not doing its proper job. Verification, revisit the property, sign it off. That’s what will guarantee us the golden thread of good retrofit and good management.

But going back to the tariffs, we have to be careful because we want to balance the grid and it’s in the producer’s interest, it will keep their costs down, if the consumer fits in with what the grid needs. But what that means is all the consumers have to adjust their behaviour. Now I’m signed up for Octopus too, and I’m in their hoop jumping exercise, which is, here we go, you’re going to get cheap energy if you don’t do anything from 6:00 to 7:00. I have to dance to that tune if I’m going to get the price and I just think morally we should be questioning smart tariffs and asking ourselves, yes, we all want to support a greener economy and we all want to support a more efficient, not necessarily sufficient, but a more efficient use of energy. But is it right that the energy producers change our behaviour to such an extent, if you’d like, almost forcing our behaviour by saying ‘we will give you cheaper energy if you do what we say?’

We obviously know that the massive grid peak is usually between about 5:00 and 7:00 at night. That’s when everybody comes home, puts the kettle on, makes the dinner. So what the Octopus people would like is for us all to start cooking our dinners at 8:00 or at 4:00.

Jimmy Black

OK, another bit of coercion that may be on the cards is that in some areas we may be obliged to become members of a local heat network if the Scottish Government’s plans come to fruition, is that a good thing?

Fionn Stevenson

Oh gosh. District heating networks are really interesting. I remember taking down a bunch of Glasgow councillors to Sheffield. This would probably be in about 1990, so about 34 years ago. They had had their fingers burnt with district heating and bear in mind this is 1990 so they weren’t very keen on doing it. I was very keen. So I took them down to Sheffield and I said come and see how Sheffield does it. I’ve been a student here and I’ve seen them put the city-wide district heating in. I took them down, they were very impressed. We went back, we went into the Gorbals and I was the project architect for district heating for 660 flats in the Gorbals. Gas-fired boilers, just four boilers for 665 flats.

Sounded like a win-win, yeah? It went desperately wrong and that was because the infrastructure was poorly designed. We were using materials and components that were coming from abroad. They weren’t produced here. We were using technical know-how from the continent. It wasn’t from here. We were being quite experimental and the system went wrong. We found out that we’d cemented in valves that needed access. The tenants found out how to bypass the system and get free energy, which was terrific for them, but not great for the housing association.

So in the end, the housing association involved took out the district heating. Now I’m just putting that out there to sound a slight warning, which is I think there is a role for district heating but I don’t think we should rush into it until we’ve got more experience of doing it in the UK, better experience, our own in-house know-how, preferably our own in-house producers would be ideal and if we do go for it, it has to be done on a kind of no regrets basis, where we can also walk away from it because that poor housing association in Glasgow, they had to spend half over half a million pounds ripping stuff out and that was very much a deep regret. So if we do go for district heating, there’s got to be a way of extricating ourselves from it as well.

Kieran Findlay

In terms of building improvements, how much of a role does finance play? I’m trying to get my head around why blanket approaches are taken. I’m sure it’s not a convenience, but there could be a question of economies of scale or just scrambling around for whatever funding streams are available. Is that to blame as much as anything?

Fionn Stevenson

Well, let’s just take a very, very deep dive on this. It’s not particularly helpful because it’s quite abstract, but I think it’s important in terms of framing the debate again. We work in a capitalist system. We work in a system where people have to make a profit. So there is every incentive to over-produce and overspecify and overwork. As an architect, I will make more money if I’m working on a percentage basis if something costs more. As an engineer, I’ll make more money on a percentage basis if something costs more. So I think finance has got a lot to do with it, but it’s more how the finance is engineered.

So for example, if you look at contracts, wouldn’t it be amazing if social housing providers turned round to their framework professionals and said we’d like a new contract arrangement with you. We will actually pay you to reduce the cost of our building and we’ll pay you to reduce the amount of services that we need. We’ll pay you on that basis. In effect, we’ll pay you to outsource yourself from the project almost. That would be an amazing new form of contract.

In terms of how housing associations fund. Yes, they’re trapped in this economy of scale. Because scale means bigger profit. It is very difficult for housing providers because there are only so many set types of contracts and those contracts don’t make it easy to fund effectively. They may fund efficiently but not necessarily effectively. So let me give you another example in terms of financing. It’s very difficult to get grants for reusing materials. It’s very easy to get grants for recycling materials, and that’s because there’s more profit in recycling than there is in reuse because you can create more added value because you do more processing in the recycled materials.

So there are all these things that the poor housing developer gets stuck in this kind of web of overproduction. The grants? I, yeah, I despair with the grant system because I see housing providers chasing their tails, going after grants that predetermine how they can respond. One thing I really enjoyed about the Scottish Housing Federation’s response to the net zero, I thought that was a good response where they said, ‘look we we actually want to go for a situation where decisions are devolved, back down to us as the provider. We know what we’ve got, we know what’s on our doorstep. We don’t want all this top-down government telling us how to do it’. And I really, really respect that because I do think people on the ground have a good idea, providing their measuring and monitoring and not just modelling, they do have a good idea of what’s going on.

Jimmy Black

I suppose an example of that is where the Scottish Government might say every new house is to be a Passivhaus. Every retrofit is to be an EnerPHit.

Fionn Stevenson

Exactly. When grants, when housing providers take a grant, which is preconditioned on using certain approaches and achieving certain outcomes, alarm bells ring for me because what I see is a lot of advisors down there in down at Edinburgh in the Scottish Executive dreaming up these abstractly effective measures that they’re then going to apply to their grants and they’re not real. They’re just not real and they’re not tested and and proven. So yeah, I think the grant system needs reform. And I think there should be much, much more of a bottom-up approach, much, much more.

Jimmy Black

Can we go back to the insulation? I was a convener of housing at Dundee when we did that insulation that you were rude about on LinkedIn.

Fionn Stevenson

Sorry, sorry about that!

Jimmy Black

But it’s relevant to the question about grants. We got grants to reclad our multis and we got grants to reclad a whole number of low-rise tenements. One of the ones that I think you saw in Stirling Park probably up near The Law, certainly that thing where they’ve missed out the lintel is in and around those houses. It was a matter of grabbing what you could get and doing it.

It might be it wasn’t the best thing to do, but it was something we could do and that’s part of the problem at the moment is it’s so expensive to actually do the upgrades and we’re all worried about the rents and of course, the Scottish Housing Regulator is on our backs all the time saying that you can’t put the rents up anymore, you’ve got to try and limit them to an affordable rent so you know it’s difficult.

Fionn Stevenson

It is. I mean, it’s a wicked problem and I really don’t envy the social housing sector in Scotland.

Jimmy Black

And Fionn, maybe we did do the wrong thing with that cladding, and Kieran has a story.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah. Well, I also recognised the picture that you put up and took a straw poll of one my mum, who lives in a council home in Dundee and was part of, I don’t think as early as you were there, I think her improvement, her external wall installation programme was later. But she can see untidy finishes around the bottoms of the homes. She says some of the ventilation gaps have fallen off. She could still feel draughts after all this work had taken place. How big an issue is the lack of skills?

Fionn Stevenson
Massive, absolutely massive. And it comes back though I want to bring it back to education and verification. We need 750,000 construction professionals and tradespeople retrained. I’m not gonna say necessarily trained, but retrained and actually retraining is harder to do than training because.

Kieran Findlay

Changing old habits.

Fionn Stevenson

Changing old habits, you know? So it’s not just about the young apprentices coming through. We’ve got to change the juggernaut of the industry into a new understanding and that reeducation is around quality and inspection and standards. Back in the day when I was an architect, we had clerks of works. I don’t see clerks of works anymore, and they certainly don’t have the authority they used to have. You know, back in the day we had eyes and ears and continuous inspections. If a wall wasn’t straight, it came down. If the joint in the cement was too wide or too narrow, it came down. There was a real kind of attitude of care towards the finish. I think we’ve lost that in the building industry. I don’t know whether it’s to do with the naughty 90s or the post-2008 crash. I don’t know quite what it’s down to, but I do see an industry in crisis where the training is too short for the people coming through, so the apprenticeships are way too short.

 

The people in the industry are stuck in this kind of treadmill that is all around shareholder returns. I have seen tragedy on building sites where you have the trades jumping over each other completely discoordination, and it’s all a rush to get the units finished because they’ve got to meet that shareholder deadline and they’ve got to get the return. And this affects the social sector as well because the contractors, even if the social housing provider hasn’t got a shareholder, the contractors have got shareholders so they’re still under the same cosh of we’ve gotta get this stuff done and it doesn’t matter how we do it, let’s just get the damn job done.

And that’s when you get these awful things where you go back and open up a house, I’ve got a little infrared camera that I put on top of my phone, my little Android phone, it’s about £100 anybody can buy one. They’re cheap and cheerful, they’re not hugely accurate, but they can tell you if your cavity wall insulation’s missing or not. So I went round to this friend. She’d had cavity wall put in. 50% of it missing.

Now this comes back to your chap who’s saying we’ve done all the low-hanging fruit and it comes back to my book and it comes back to a plea to the social housing sector. I know, the Scottish Government have turned down yet again post-occupancy evaluation. They’ve turned it down and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations has turned it down again, as not practical.

Jimmy Black

What is it?

Fionn Stevenson

What is post-occupancy evaluation? Good post-occupancy evaluation as I set out in my book, has five key areas. So one is the thing we do already which is asking the occupants, the first thing you do is ask the occupant, get the tenant survey. How did we do?

Jimmy Black

This is after building a new house.

Fionn Stevenson

This is after a new house or a retrofit. It must be done for a retrofit and that’s been missed at the moment. How did we do? Most social housing providers are doing that already. The next thing is what are your energy bills like? Some housing providers are doing that. Most aren’t. Yeah. What are your energy bills like? The next thing I would say is do a sample infrared. Don’t look at it all, but just do a spot-check sample infrared photography to look whether your insulation is being done properly. It’s an X-ray. It’s something that nobody with ordinary eyes can do and it will reveal a host of interesting insights. Unfortunately, it will often mean the contractor having to go back.

We need a qualitative survey. We need a quantitative understanding of whether the energy bills have actually gone down as they were predicted to do. And we need to look at the fabric and see whether it’s really done it. Now, even if you just did those three on the properties and if you don’t necessarily do it on every single property, you do it as a sample, if you do one in 20 houses, that will give you a really good verification level for knowing whether you’re actually in the ballpark with this contractor.

Jimmy Black

I think we’re gonna have to bring this to an end. We’ve gone on a good long time. Something I heard you say at the Dundee Civic Trust…

Fionn Stevenson

Oh yes.

Jimmy Black

…was that you said that the current housing emergency requires a national house building programme. Now, what did you mean? Maybe we already have that.

Fionn Stevenson

Yeah. No, I think what I meant was, if I remember rightly, I was talking about getting us back onto a war footing. I hate the word war. I mean, at the moment, we’ve got awful wars going on, awful asymmetrical wars. But one thing that the wars do do is they transform and they do extraordinary things. Baxter Park, for example in Dundee, was turned into an allotment, transformed into an allotment to produce food and I feel the housing industry has to get itself onto a war footing. It’s literally that bad. It really, really is that bad, and that needs a national programme.

Whilst I fully respect the housing association sector and the work that it’s doing, I actually would turn it back to our national governments and say we need a properly coordinated national housing programme where the government actually does take charge and I know housing providers are not what they’re gonna want to hear this, but the lack of coordination we’ve got at the moment, the lack of learning, the lack of understanding.

I mean the other thing that I despair about is we seem to keep reinventing the wheel and we don’t seem to be very good at learning from each other, whether it’s across the sector, from private to social or from social to private, there’s so many silos around. So for me it’s like, actually we really do need to get back to a national council housing or government housing huge programme both for retrofit and new build.

Jimmy Black

So bring back the Scottish Special Housing Association or even Communities Scotland.

Fionn Stevenson

Absolutely. Communities Scotland bring it back. Yeah. Yeah. And we need that level of coordination.

Kieran Findlay

Thanks Fionn Stevenson for joining us. I’m sure we could talk for others on this, but we have to bring this to an end. I will include links to the LETI retrofit guide, to your book or books, and to the aforementioned LinkedIn post into the show notes. Thanks again for joining us. My thanks to Jimmy Black as ever, and we’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks.