Homes need to be affordable to run

Whilst I am genuinely pleased to read in the Courier that Warwick District Council is planning a major increase in ‘affordable’ homes, there is one additional very important issue that it needs to consider. Homes need to be both ‘affordable’ to rent (or indeed buy) and very importantly, they need to be ‘affordable’ to run.

It is a sad fact that almost no homes built to UK building regulations or codes, perform to their design. There is what is called a ‘performance gap’.

Few people or organisations and certainly not the majority of developers, test a home once built to determine if it complies with the regulations. It is my experience that the majority of new homes are between 20 and 500 per cent worse than their designs!

This is bad news for occupants and it is one of the key reasons that ‘fuel poverty’ is increasing dramatically in the UK.

Regretfully, council officials and councillors seem unaware of these issues.

There are two solutions. The first is to ensure that developers comply with the regulations by demonstrating performance in use. The second is to introduce homes built to the Passivhaus standard which is widely used in mainland Europe. The Passivhaus standard guarantees low energy (and therefore low running costs) in that buildings must use less than 15 KWhr/m2/year for regulated energy, otherwise they do not receive the Passivhaus certificate. Passivhaus is a ‘performance in use’ standard.

I would add that ‘affordability in use’ also applies to private housing developments. Councils cannot leave the ‘performance in use’ of the thousands of new homes that are planned in the hands of private developers the majority of whom are failing to deliver low energy in use.

George Martin, Coventry Road, Kenilworth