1. Press Release, UK at forefront of a low carbon economic revolution, 15 July 2009, posted on www.decc.gov.uk

2. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, London, DBIS and DECC, 15 July 2009, p 3, posted on www.berr.gov.uk

3. Ian Abley, We are witnessing a British built "housing crisis" that Government is powerless to resolve, 23 July 2008, posted on this website here

4. Prince Charles, 'Facing the Future', The Richard Dimbleby Lecture as delivered by HRH The Prince of Wales, St James’s Palace State Apartments, London, 8 July 2009. For transcript see here as directed on the Press Release, 'Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2009: The Prince of Wales', 9 July 2009, BBC, posted on www.bbc.co.uk

5. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, London, DBIS and DECC, 15 July 2009, p 42, posted on www.berr.gov.uk

6. www.ivisnet.org

7. Amanda Birch, 'Vacuum promises a thinner future', BD magazine, 8 May 2009, p 16 and 17, posted on www.bdonline.co.uk and in pdf format on www.ivisnet.org

8. Ed Miliband, 'Low Carbon Transition Plan: statement to the House of Commons', 15 July 2009, posted on www.decc.gov.uk

The British Government promotes twenty-first century eco-thickness

The First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and Lord President of the Council, Peter Mandelson, together with Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, have published The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy. They are claiming it promises an "economic revolution". (1) It is in fact an environmentalist retreat from industrial production, at least as far as the struggling British construction sector is concerned. It is a disastrous strategy that will result in further de-industrialisation, supposedly with the aim of addressing a rather vague threat of climate change.

Mandelson and Miliband insist The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy '... can ensure that our economy emerges from the global downturn at the forefront of the technological and social shift that will define the next century.' (2) This is "greenwash" of the establishment kind, which many institutional and corporate leaders of the construction industry will sadly rush to endorse. There may be a technological and social shift that will define the next century. It will be towards the laborious construction of new eco-homes, and the laborious refurbishment of the stock of mostly draughty, poorly insulated, and badly serviced housing. The laboriousness will be the stuffing of more and more insulation into new and existing houses and flats to achieve, at least on paper, a contribution to a national carbon reduction target by 2020.

Government thinks that it will be building 240,000 "zero carbon" homes every year by 2106. In fact at least 500,000 homes are needed every year to meet household growth and replace the oldest of the stock at a rate of 1% a year. (3) In 2009 new house building is down to 100,000 a year, and there is no reason why that level of production will increase even when, as is starting to happen, house price inflation returns. House builders are quite likely to follow The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy to become luxury eco-home builders. They will be content to build around 100,000 "green" homes a year to get through the planning system. They will build homes that show their environmental credentials by the thickness of walls and roofs - full of sheeps wool or hemp, packed with straw bales, or made from low-fired clay blocks.

This, of course, is the approach to new house building promoted by Prince Charles prominently on the BBC. He advocates '... the use of local materials to create local identity which, when combined with cutting-edge developments in building technology, can enhance a sense of place and real community.' Just as Mandelson and Miliband claim theirs is an industrial strategy, Charles promotes green building technology.

'My Foundation for the Built Environment is involved in the building of a “Natural House” at the Building Research Establishment in Watford. This is suggesting a new model for green building that is built on site and easily adapted for volume building. Its design has a contemporary, yet timeless feel even though it is based on the time-honoured, geometric principles of balance and harmony. And it uses, instead of bricks, new, inter-locking, clay blocks which are low-fired, and therefore low carbon, much quicker to lay and are moulded in such a way that they breathe, but also have an astonishing capacity to insulate.' (4)

Government is following Prince Charles with his "Natural House", even though it is unfinished and unproven in terms of performance. In The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy Mandelson and Miliband look to "crop based construction materials" and the building of another low carbon materials demonstration house at the Building Research Establishment in Watford. They are going a bit further than individual "exemplar" houses:

'The Government is investing up to £6 million to construct 60 or more low carbon affordable homes built with innovative, highly insulating renewable materials. The new scheme will demonstrate the viability of these materials, act as a catalyst for the renewable construction materials industry and engage the affordable housing sector in the low carbon agenda.' (5)

Gummer might gloat, but he made the Building Research Establishment what it is today 11.11.2007

Charles talks of building walls and roofs thickly in "volume", but what does he know of the market. Government also imagines it can use renewable insulation materials to produce "affordable" housing. Walls and roofs will get thicker, but housing will not be built in sufficient quantity for a growing population, and will not be affordable on most British household incomes. The aesthetic of eco-thickness will sell.

The exemplar homes, and the small developments funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, will use the natural, less industrially processed materials approved of by Prince Charles. For the 100,000 a year house builders there may at some stage be enough cropped materials to go round. If that happens government will claim an agricultural success. House builders may more pragmatically build thicker walls and roofs with the glass and mineral fibres that are available, or some of the foams that are acceptable in green specifications. That is certainly the hope of the fibre and foam manufacturers, looking to double or treble the thickness of their materials in a construction. The green tendency will be to use greater thicknesses of less processed, and more laborious to install insulation materials, cut-to-fit on site. This will make the walls and roofs on new eco-homes around half a metre thick, but that might be fashionable. Having more material in the walls and roof will show how little energy is used in the new and expensive eco-home.

Thick insulation is a problem in the refurbishment of the stock of 26 million existing houses and flats. It is not always possible to cover the outside with great thicknesses of natural materials that, contrary to the Prince's claim, have a low capacity to insulate. Even industrially produced fibres and foams, which green purists think are too processed, must be used thickly. It is less possible to apply thicknesses of insulation inside the existing home, when most British homes are so small. A lot of filling of masonry cavity walls has been carried out under energy efficiency schemes, with little regard for why the drained air cavity was there in the first place. But no existing housing has walls with cavities of up to the 300mm that would be required for insulants that satisfy greens.

What is needed are better industrial products that can reliably and simply insulate a house or flat to extremes of performance in less than 50mm.

The architectural fact is that only made-to-fit insulation, prefabricated as an industrially processed product, can achieve the thermal performance being discussed with a minimal thickness. Silica Aerogels are the limit of performance for trapping air at ambient air pressure, being 5% solid and 95% air space. To make a serious reduction in thickness of insulation the air in the material must be removed. That requires a form of vacuum insulation. (6) A micro-porous core material of fibre, foam, or powder must be partially evacuated, enclosed in an airtight envelope, and encapsulated in a protective construction. Vacuum insulation panels are an industrial technology similar to the vacuum packing of coffee. Fridges are made with VIPs to maximise the space inside. (7) The same needs to happen in buildings. The following graph shows the relationship of thermal performance to the thickness of different insulation materials:

Sheeps wool and hemp, straw bales, and low-fired clay blocks are positioned increasingly off the scale to the right on thickness. Foam glass as an industrial product is poor as an insulant, as is cellulose fibre. The sorts of glass and mineral fibre insulation that can be bought in any builder's merchant require substantial thicknesses. Foams have better performance, and are familiar as cut-to-fit insulation. However only the use of processed vacuum insulation, as a made-to-fit industrial product reduces insulation thicknesses to the architectural dimensions required.

If Britain is to follow the The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy launched by Mandelson and Miliband, people must increasingly reject industrial VIP manufacture. If Britain's planners are to heed Prince Charles in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture, (4) they must plan "Natural Houses" of around 500mm eco-thickness, not architecturally subtle VIP homes. The BRE has gone for the fees that the Prince, and now government, are willing to pay for demonstrations of thickness in pursuit of carbon reduction.

On behalf of New Labour Miliband boasts that Britain has produced a carbon reduction plan to 2020 that should inspire other industrial and industrialising nations. 'Having been the first country in the world to set legally binding carbon budgets, we are now the first country in the world to assign every department a carbon budget alongside its financial budget,' he told the House of Commons. (8) We rather seem to be the first country in the world to ignore the space and time saving potential of construction technologies that require energy in their production processes, to save energy in the operation of well serviced buildings.

Britain is retreating from industry and makes an environmental fetish out of bulky "natural" materials that don't work well. Why favour materials that are lightly processed as agricultural crops, or are low-fired but need rendering? Why not accept processing, as all timber is processed, and welcome the durability of fully fired bricks? This carbon obsessed idiocy in construction works against other great materials like concrete, glass, steel, and aluminium. Will low-fired clay blocks soon be considered too processed by greens, so that we are reduced to using unfired earth?

Anyone wanting to challenge the advocates of natural eco-thickness should come to the International Vacuum Insulation Symposium at the Royal Institution on 17 and 18 September 2009. (6) The event is not government funded. The brick and block manufacturers have taken the lead in sponsorship, supporting the vacuum insulation manufacturers. It should be a meeting of industrialists and the designers - architects and engineers - who want to produce more and better buildings.

For their part government is insisting that insulation must be renewable and crop based rather than an industrially processed product. Meaning that small British houses and flats will be thickly walled and roofed. Built in too few numbers to accommodate British household growth. Meaning that every existing home must be refurbished indefinitely. That is truly pitiful for an old industrial democracy like Britain.

Not enough room to "Swing a Cat" 24.06.2009

Government abuses the words Industrial and Strategy, sharing the Prince's low aspirations for twenty-first century construction and architecture. An industrial strategy worthy of the name would promote the development of highly processed vacuum insulation, and would expect skills in design, manufacture, installation, and maintenance.

An attempt to make "green jobs" rather than raise productivity and wages, The UK Low Carbon Industrial Strategy should be seen and criticised as an environmentalist strategy of de-industrialisation.

Ian Abley 15.07.2009, updated 17.07.2009

An edited version of this article also features on:

Energ!se the future now, say James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky 30.01.2009

Buy Energ!se: A future for energy innovation, for £5.99 from Amazon

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org. All material is Copyright © 2000 - 2009 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.