By Helen Mooney
30 October 2009
Local authorities must get better at ‘greening homes’ to help reduce domestic carbon dioxide emissions, the Audit Commission has claimed.
Its report, Lofty ambitions: the role of councils in reducing domestic CO2 emissions, calls on councils to help shrink England’s carbon footprint.
However, it concedes that the ‘multiplicity of funding streams has created confusion for householders and duplication of effort when energy suppliers and others approach the same households with competing offers’.
Domestic homes are responsible for one-third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and the report calls for better lagging, insulation, reglazing and modernising to make homes more energy efficient.
The report is also critical of the government’s £2.7bn a year winter fuel payments, which it said were a missed opportunity to both help keep people warm and to reduce CO2.
Commission chair Michael O’Higgins said: ‘The global issue of climate change must now become a domestic one. There is a growing realisation that, unchecked, climate change will destroy the natural and built environments.’
He added that cutting power usage by a third could cost £50bn, but said it would be made back ‘in only eight years as household fuel bills would tumble’.
Local Government Association senior policy adviser Abigail Burridge told Public Finance that councils were already spending the money they had to reduce carbon emissions ‘as best they can’, and called for councils to be given more power to act on green policies.
‘The policy landscape itself needs to change so that councils are enabled to take a leading role... at the moment the power and the funding lies with energy companies,’ she said.
Friends of the Earth’s senior climate campaigner Tony Bosworth said: ‘Cutting energy waste from homes is a cost-effective way to slash carbon emissions. We need a national street-by-street programme to deliver a high standard of home insulation and green energy generation, with local councils playing a central role in the delivery.’
30 October 2009
Local authorities must get better at ‘greening homes’ to help reduce domestic carbon dioxide emissions, the Audit Commission has claimed.
Its report, Lofty ambitions: the role of councils in reducing domestic CO2 emissions, calls on councils to help shrink England’s carbon footprint.
However, it concedes that the ‘multiplicity of funding streams has created confusion for householders and duplication of effort when energy suppliers and others approach the same households with competing offers’.
Domestic homes are responsible for one-third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and the report calls for better lagging, insulation, reglazing and modernising to make homes more energy efficient.
The report is also critical of the government’s £2.7bn a year winter fuel payments, which it said were a missed opportunity to both help keep people warm and to reduce CO2.
Commission chair Michael O’Higgins said: ‘The global issue of climate change must now become a domestic one. There is a growing realisation that, unchecked, climate change will destroy the natural and built environments.’
He added that cutting power usage by a third could cost £50bn, but said it would be made back ‘in only eight years as household fuel bills would tumble’.
Local Government Association senior policy adviser Abigail Burridge told Public Finance that councils were already spending the money they had to reduce carbon emissions ‘as best they can’, and called for councils to be given more power to act on green policies.
‘The policy landscape itself needs to change so that councils are enabled to take a leading role... at the moment the power and the funding lies with energy companies,’ she said.
Friends of the Earth’s senior climate campaigner Tony Bosworth said: ‘Cutting energy waste from homes is a cost-effective way to slash carbon emissions. We need a national street-by-street programme to deliver a high standard of home insulation and green energy generation, with local councils playing a central role in the delivery.’
