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Housing crisis: efficiency opportunity

Panel: 1. Foundations of future energy policy

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Author:
Jack Carrington, Association for Decentralised Energy/ADE, United Kingdom

Abstract

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis. Government figures show the just 106,000 new properties were built in 2010/11 despite a growing population and a shortage of affordable family homes. However, housing energy efficiency policy is often considered in isolation from the wider context. This paper explores the economic and demographic changes that have led to such a serious shortage of housing and the implications the potential solutions to the crisis will have for the energy efficiency of the housing stock.

Since the start of the financial crisis the housing crisis has been a major focus of UK economic debate. The Government ‘s deregulatory policy has targeted planning regulations and energy efficiency requirements have also come under fire. Most commentators focus on the problem of insufficient new homes being built. An alternative view of the crisis considers the growing number of people living in family sized homes into old age. This shift combined with a longer lived population has restricted the number of homes available to young families and can burden the elderly with a property they cannot manage later in life. Helping older households to down-size could reduce running costs and free up equity to improve the quality of life and maintain the independence of our ageing population. This move could also encourage the energy efficiency retrofit of homes that previous owners were unable to manage.

The paper compares two scenarios, one in which new properties are built for families to ease the housing crisis while the elderly continue to under-occupy their homes and a second in which the elderly are encouraged to down-size, so reducing the need to build new housing. The implications of both scenarios will be considered in terms of financial and energy costs as well as the standard of living for all generations.

Finally the paper discusses the lessons that can be drawn for other Member States from the extreme example of the UK’s housing crisis.

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