PRESS RELEASE Green Councillor proposes making Government Insulation scheme free to all.

Green Councillor proposes making Government Insulation scheme free to all.

The Government has announced a scheme to start in September that would provide grants of up to £5000 for insulation work on peoples homes but still leaving them to find a third of the costs

Kirklees Councillor and Green Party Energy Spokesperson Andrew Cooper has proposed making the scheme free to boost the take up by householders, ensure quality work is carried out and so help reduce fuel bills and carbon emissions.

Councillor Cooper said

"This scheme falls well short of the Green Party's proposal for a Green New Deal in terms of funding and scope but there are still positive things we can do to improve the scheme announced by the Chancellor."

“When Kirklees ran the free Kirklees Warm Zone project between 2007 and 2011 we insulated over 50,000 homes and it was the biggest scheme of its kind in the country. What really made the scheme fly was the Green Party amendment to the 2007 Council Budget  that made the scheme free for all applicants. This is what we should be doing with this scheme.”

“With the cost of capital borrowing so low at present the Council can use its financial leverage to top up the Government proposal ensuring people don’t have to dip into their pockets during a time of recession and job losses. Really the Government should make the scheme free but in the absence of that Councils like Kirklees and across the Country could fill the gap and make the difference. Existing funding via Regional Sources such as the West Yorkshire Combined Authority could also play a big role in financing such a scheme ”

“For householders the hundreds they will save oon their energy bills  means more money in their pockets at a time of huge financial uncertainty. The impact on reducing our carbon emissions will also be significant,”

“The involvement of local councils in the scheme will help with local promotion and also provide local accountability helping ensure quality of work”

“ This level of funding could allow us to carry out insulation work on hard to treat cavity walls, provide external wall insulation, attic room and under floor insulation. It is a huge opportunity if done properly wih a focus on quality work.”

“ Kirklees has the opportunity once again to be a national Leader in action on Climate Change and show through example what can be achieved with imagination and political commitment. If other Councils follow our lead we could make the scheme free for millions across the UK. “

Stirley Community Farm's Passivhaus Barn project launched

 There are exciting developments going on at Stirley Community Farm. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust have commenced their Cre8 barn project. One of the old stone barns is being completely refurbished to passivhaus building standards by local award winning company the Green Building Company with substantial support from Veolia following a successful bid by the Trust. Passivhaus standards are where buildings are insulated to a very high standard with air tightness being key to acheiving extremely low heating requirements in the building. The Green Building Company are national leaders in passivhaus design and build and this will be the first time in the UK that such standards have been applied to the retrofit of a non domestic property.(Correction in comments from Green Building Company -oops!) It is pleasing to have yet another high eco spec development in the Newsome Ward. Bill Butcher of GBC is doing a blog on the construction of the barn which you can access here. The launch event featured Barry Sheerman MP who provided his support to the event and told us of his passion for the English poet John Clare. The new barn wuill be used for training a skills development and will have very negligible heating costs.

Still a bit of work required on the roof!

Green Party member Karen Allison in the barn. I'm sure she'll thank me for putting this photo up!

Oswald Dodds of Veolia , Rob Stoneman of YWT and Barry Sheerman. I promised Barry I'd caption this 'Champagne Socialist'

The Denby Dale Passivhaus

Here's a film about the Denby Dale Passivhaus completed this year. I saw it during construction an at its opening and I'm incredibly impressed by the work the groundbreaking work the Green Building Company have done on this project. The estimated heating costs are around £75/year and around £100 for the hot water (though the solar thermal system may reduce that cost). It is of national significance as it uses cavity construction and so could by replicated by the building industry across the UK. The commitment to reducing energy demand through airtightness, super insulation standards and heat recovery ventilation is impressive. Great to see such an important project in the Huddersfield area.

Kirklees Warm Zone ends

It's been three year mission, to boldy insulate cavities and lofts that have never been insulated before and what a huge success it has been. The headline figures to date are Loft insulation – 41387 homes and Cavity wall insulation 20357 homes. It has been the largest insulation scheme of it's kind ever in the UK. This will rise by a few hundred but we're pretty much at the end of it. We have acheived the previous Labour Government's target of insulating every avalable loft and cavity by 2015 a whole five years early! (Incidentally no plan was ever produced by the last government to acheive this national target)

One particularly gratifying  things is to see the parliamentary debate on energy efficiency today to see the Kirklees scheme feature strongly with references to the strong community links by Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker and our own Caroline Lucas MP. The new focus under the Carbon Emissions Reduction Targets legislation is to have a greater a focus on insulation measures what is key is whether the insulation can be installed for free or at the very least with no upfront costs. We have shown in Kirklees that you get 3 times more installations with a free area based insulation scheme than you get with able to pay offers. If you are going to the trouble of knocking on every door in your council areas, as we did with Kirklees Warm Zone, then you want as much take up as possible therefore a free scheme makes perfect sense. Officers have calculated for every £1 that the Council has spent on the scheme a further £4 has been generated in the local economy. An anti-recessionary policy? You bet it is!

It's not quite the end. The Warm Zone may end but the offer of free insulation to Kirklees households continues so those who have somehow been missed will still be able to get their homes insulated. We now have to move onward and carry on driving down carbon emissions with other schemes

Leeds Greens do a Kirklees!

The Leeds Green Party Councillors Anne and David Blackburn (pictured) have done good in their agreement with the Labour Party (with a bit of input from Kirklees Green Party and Labour Councillors).

Labour needed 2 Green Councillors to run the Council and the condition of a £30 million free insulation scheme was the price. 90'000+ homes to be insulated, anywhere between £8 and £13.5 million to be saved each year in saved fuel bills. It will be the UKs biggest domestic carbon saving scheme.

Over to you Con Dem Coalition Government - top that. Actually they cut the Low Carbon Buildings Programme this week throwing the solar thermal, biomass and heat pump industries into turmoil. Not a very good start!

Con-Dems. Where's the fire?

The Con-Dem Coalition Government has a large section on the environment. Leaving aside for a second the fact that the targets they have adopted for reducing carbon emissions are inadequate it is certainly more ambitious than the Labour Govt's programme. As always implementation is the test. It will be interesting to see how the Cons try and get round the financing of nuclear without using public money. No doubt there will be some dodge somewhere that they have in mind. We'll see.

There was specific mention in the Con-Dem agreement for support for a "full establishment for a feed-in tariff for electricity". What this means we will see but if the Tories are true to their word this will mean that solar photovoltaic installations installed prior to the 15/7/10 will qualify for the feed in tariff. There are lots of ways that this could be interpreted to be more or less generous so the devil is as always in the detail.

The Environment section on Energy covers most of the main high level policy areas but oddly there is no mention of the proposed Renewable Heat Incentive due to come into being next April under Labour's timetable. In what has been a fairly lacklustre performance on the renewable energy agenda by Labour this was a real innovation a genuinely ground breaking proposal. It promised a huge growth in the biomass, heat pump and solar thermal industries with users of renewable heat being rewarded with a dedicated tariff.Of course it's omission does not mean they won't pursue this policy but it certainly worth a Parliamentary Question at the very least.

The other Labour Government target (which they had no plan to acheive) was to insulate every loft and cavity wall in domestic properties by 2015. It would be interesting to see if this policy is retained and how it will be implemented. The Kirklees programme is due to finish in about 6 weeks with over 50'000 properties insulated in the last three years. So we have acheived the Government target 5 years ahead of target! So another Parliamentary Question worth asking Mr Chris Huhne.

If only we had a Green Party MP. Ah we do!

Kirklees Budget Amendments - Good, Bad and Bogus

So all can now be revealed. The time for amendments to the Kirklees Budget has passed. We will go the budget meeting next Wednesday with a Labour budget based on the financial constraints forced on us by this Government following their mismanangement of the economy. There are 3 amendments, the Conservatives, the Green Party's and the the Lib Dems. We have gained some things out of the budget process. In our amendment we have the extension of the free insulation scheme Kirklees Warm Zone for another 3 years. I tried to get them to rebrand it 'Green Zone' to avoid confusion with the Governments 'Warm Zone' scheme but also to annoy the Lib Dems (see previous posts!). Of course they weren't having it but the issue of confusion between the 2 schemes is genuine and will have to be addressed at some point soon. Not least because 'Warm Zone' is a brand that we have to pay for. There are also opportunities to bring new measures to the scheme free draughtproofing for vulnerable households, electricity saving measures such as Real Time Displays and Powerdown and deliver them on an area by area basis.

Other things we acheived were in the 'side agreement'.

We have a commitment to continue to support the core funding costs of 'Build' the body which provides training in skills for the building trade for brickies, plumbers and decorators until these are picked up thorugh supportive contracts such as Building Schools for the Future further down the line. This is exactly the sort of project we should be supporting at these times.

We also have a commitment to develop support for projects promoting local food producers in the area. This has been a strong theme for Julie Stewart-Turner our first Green Party Mayor during her year in civic office.

There is a commitment to come up with proposals for a free bus link from Huddersfield Town to the Galpharm Stadium possibly electrically powered. This would provide a link to all the sports and leisure facilities in the area and reduce the need for car travel at a venue which isn't directly served by Public Transport and where the car parks are often full at peak times.

Our big hope is that we will be able to establish a free solar panel scheme for private householders with the capital costs for the Council being met by the new Clean Energy Cashback being introduced this April. We are due a report in June on whether or not it is a goer. The Lib Dems don't like the idea of this scheme and didn't believe it was much worth pursuing. No doubt if we make it work it will be appearing in a Lib Dem leaflet as one of their initiatives. Bitter? Moi? You bet I am!

We have already established the principal of self funding capital for solar projects with the £5million agreed for solar panels for council buildings last year. Providing free solar panels at no net cost to the Council for private householders is more difficult but I don't think impossible.

So what of the Lib Dems Budget amendment? Well surprise surprise we have £2 million to upgrade the insulation of Council Tenants. But I hear you say 'Didn't they claim they had already acheived this in that scurrilous leaflet they posted in Almondbury in December?' (see December post 'Dem Fibs from the Lib Dems') Well yes they did. So they lied, it's what they do. More energy stuff from them £300k for Solar PV for community buildings, some additional monies linked to the boiler scrappage scheme and an energy advice project for the elderly. All good but there is nothing else! If you didn't know better you would think they were desperately trying to win back lost ground on the energy agenda. No matter, if that's the case then the Green Party has acheived more in this budget than simply getting our own initiatives passed we've pushed the other parties on or agenda and got gains for local people.

The Conservatives submitted an amendment it means their Council Tax is a 1% increase instead of a 2% increase. To do that they have further decimated jobs, services and cancelled anti recession measures, but they have the cynical 'We're cheaper' headline for their leaflets.

I'm definitely getting grumpier as I get older.

Dem Fibs from the Lib Dems

Politics can be a dirty business and the trustworthiness of politicians is probably not rated much higher than second hand car salesman or estate agents. What is needed at this point more than ever is demonstrable honesty by politicians. So when I was passed the latest Lib Dem leaflet from Almondbury I had hoped for better but was to be disappointed. Imagine my astonishment when I read that the Green Party have called for lower insulation standards in council housing than the private housing improved under Warm Zone and that we wish to put concrete insulating render on historic buildings. Lib Dem Leader Kath Pinnock is quoted as saying "only the Greens could think it sensible to destroy our stone heritage buildings at a huge cost to the tax payer". None of this is true, of course. At Full Council as I was leaving the chamber I asked Cllr Pinnock why she had said these things but she refused to talk to me about it and parted swiftly saying "You shouldn't take credit for Warm Zone!". All became clear at this point. The Lib Dems had indeed proposed the Kirklees Warm Zone but not with free insulation. There are any number of Warm Zones up and down the country but without the Green Party amendment making it free it would have less than a third the take up of the current scheme, up to 40'000 homes might never have been insulated under a Lib Dem Warm Zone. The credit, locally and nationally the Greens have received for the free insulation scheme has clearly got up their nose. They usually put a misleading statement in their leaflet like "The Lib Dems introduced Kirklees Warm Zone that provides free insulation for all households". I usually let this pass but this latest leaflet is beyond the pale.

At a meeting on Thursday evening she asked me to tell he if there were any grant schemes to provide solar panels for church buildings. I told her about a suitable grant scheme but not before pointing out the irony of her asking for my advice.

Cllr Kath Pinnock isn't beyond stretching the truth to the limit as this link to the blog on the Yougen website illustrates ;

http://www.yougen.co.uk/blog-entry/1329/Insulation+is+free+for+everyone+in+Kirklees+/