Issue - meetings

There will be a presentation on this item. Presentation slides are attached.

Councillor Sarah Warren, Cabinet Member for Climate and Sustainable Travel, and Jane Wildblood, Strategic Manager: Climate & Environmental Sustainability, gave a presentation which covered the following:

·  Introduction

·  Update on current action

·  Energy @ Home – advice service

·  Sharing householder experience

·  WECA Retrofit Accelerator Hub

·  Exploration of B&NES level approach

·  The Panel asked to consider…

Panel members made the following points and asked the following questions:

Councillor Hirst asked the following questions (Officer/Cabinet Member replies shown in italics):

·  Have we got enough expertise and relevant strategic leadership within the Council? The leadership has been building over the last year, we now have a Director of Sustainable Communities and Head of Green Transformation.

·  How soon until we can drill down and set clear targets, for example setting out the number of households within a timeframe. There is currently a lot of discussion around this – certain issues are being discussed such as what depth of retrofit constitutes a retrofit. There are also issues around the type of housing (some need deep retrofit).

·  Regarding funding – do we have partnerships with funding organisations to help people? The authorities with large projects on this are the ones with housing stock. There is the Energy at Home Scheme for advice and signposting to available funding for householders. We have proposed to WECA Retrofit Accelerator Hub to try to develop an energy loan scheme.

Councillor O Brien asked the following questions (Officer/Cabinet Member replies shown in italics):

·  Do you have raw data to feed into the new software? The tool uses national data on Energy Performance Certificates. 60 thousand homes in BANES have EPC’s and this number is gradually growing as people buy/sell properties.

·  Some of the jargon used such as ‘retrofitting’ and ‘low carbon heating’ could be amended to ‘cost saving’ – this language may make it appeal to people more and be more accessible. More should be done to get solar panels on roofs, they can repay faster than expected. The officer stated that this makes sense and is a good point. Every household is different and we need to be flexible.

·  Curo are starting work, this is a massive task due to the condition of some of the properties.

Councillor Johnson asked the following questions (Officer replies shown in italics):

·  The main problem is the cost to households. The cost-of-living crisis means this is not everyone’s priority.

·  Is there a cost for the assessor part of the process – do the Council provide this? We will feed this into the development process, the WECA Retrofit Accelerator Hub will be looking at assessors.

·  Could we fund EPC’s on houses that we do not already have them for?

These are great ideas and will be fed into the process.

Councillor Bromley asked about engagement with the private sector and suggested that maybe people don’t always know what ‘retrofitting’ means or what it involves, it can feel overwhelming. We could suggest small steps to begin with. Maybe community engagement would help to show people different types  ...  view the full minutes text for item 21