You may have missed it among all the headline-grabbing talk of increasing the minimum wage and yet more cuts to welfare, but as part of George Osborne’s summer budget announcements, this Conservative government also abolished the requirement for all new homes to be ‘zero carbon’ from April 2016.
Whilst it is reported that some housebuilders had already started work to meet the challenge, the major plc housebuilders would have probably known all along that the election of a Conservative government would at the very least, have enabled some ‘wiggle-room’ to water down or delay the requirements – if not the full scale capitulation reversal of the zero carbon policy that Osborne announced.
This pointless reversal – an appalling act of policy vandalism, will undoubtedly raise energy bills and carbon emissions well into the next century, sending out totally wrong message for the Paris climate talks. The Conservative government has cynically chosen put both house builders’ and energy providers’ profit making ahead of its deep moral responsibility to act to mitigate any possible impact on our climate in the future.
The zero-carbon commitment begun in 2006 and supported through successive governments has now been re interpreted as unnecessary ‘red tape’, allegedly holding back new house building projects, productivity and even the general UK economy.