Government redefines zero as it abandons green homes commitment

'Zero-carbon homes' was a dubious pledge under the last government, but with the coalition the tag loses any semblance of reality

Q&A: Zero-carbon homes
A house being built
Housing minister Grant Shapps's department has announced it is 'lifting burdens from the backs of builders'. Photograph: Geoffrey Robinson/Rex Features

What does zero look like to you? Is it:

a. 0


b: 56%?



"This government are committed to ensuring that all new homes post-2016 can be zero-carbon."

You might have twigged by now that what seems to be crystal clear and what is crystal clear are, in the kaleidoscopic world of coalition politics, not quite the same thing. Slipped into the same statement was the following killer caveat:

"This will involve a flexible approach."

"Flexible", as you might also be aware, is a key coalition term, a bit like "partnership" was under New Labour. It's one of those sachets of lexicographical magic dust which, sprinkled over words or numbers, turns them into whatever you want them to be. The "flexible" spell is so powerful that, in just four months, it has transmuted that unreconstructed, old-fashioned figure 0 into a thoroughly modern, fit-for-purpose 56%.

There was another magic word in Shapps's statement: "Realistic." He would, he announced, commission work from a body called (plainly enough you might think) Zero-Carbon Hub, to work out how new homes could built to zero-carbon standards in a "realistic" fashion. Zero-Carbon Hub has just published its consultation document, in which it explains that a "zero-carbon home" is one that has cut its emissions by as little as 44% compared with the 2006 building regulations.


"is particularly challenging and may not be achievable in all cases."

So, rather than redefining his target as "56%-carbon homes", Shapps has taken the more mathematically challenging, though politically effective, option of redefining zero.

It's part of a general roll-back of inconvenient words and numbers which have been troubling ministers throughout this government (especially the chancellor). Just as the so-called Zero-Carbon Hub was publishing its consultation yesterday, Shapps was also cancelling another green housing commitment. In March, the last government published a draft set of building regulations for homes built with the help of the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). The HCA exists to get more houses built in England, and to "ensure high standards of design and to embed sustainability". Or it did.

The regulations the last government proposed were not particularly onerous (reaching level 4 of the code for sustainable homes) but, as it explained, they were designed to deliver



"We're lifting burdens from the backs of builders"

The second half of the title must have got lost in the editing process – "and dumping them on the backs of householders".

Shapps maintains (without providing any reasoning to justify it) that this deregulation will save an implausible £8,000 per home for house-builders. But abandoning even the modest energy-efficiency standards proposed by the last government will load future costs on householders, as the crappy homes they'll have to live in will cost a fortune to keep warm.

The Home Builders' Federation is, of course, delighted because its members will now be able to foist any old rubbish on to a captive market. But the deregulation is unlikely to do anything to unlock the moribund industry, which is failing to build the homes we need for reasons which have nothing (that means 0%) to do with energy regulations.

In the next roll-back, Shapps will doubtless announce that a cardboard box represents the latest in zero-Carbon home technology. That seems to be the way government housing policy is going, and the only option that increasing numbers of people ill-served by both government and industry are likely to have.