“Opportunities to renew and reimagine our shared values as a country and a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland only come around every few generations. We are in such a time.” Archbishops Pastoral Letter to the Parishes and Chaplaincies of the Church of England, 6th May 2017
In the run-up to the General Election on 8th June, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury have published a letter calling on voters to consider their “obligations to future generations”. These obligations are to alleviate poverty, to fund the NHS, to support education, and to develop housing. The letter also says that we need to develop our communities, support marriage, and be generous to refugees. Apparently Brexit has given us a once-every-few-generations opportunity to renew our shared values, as if we are handcuffed from doing so for decades at a stretch. There is no mention of caring for the environment, its exclusion by implication placing it outside the top tier of shared values.
No doubt the Archbishops are deeply caring and Britain would be a better place if their wishes were accommodated. But a failure to mention the environment is worrying. In the years to come, it will not be possible to disassociate our treatment of the natural world from human poverty, health and living standards. If we are to avoid environmental disaster, we will need radical changes to our way of life, the implementation of which cannot wait for the next “opportunity” in a few decades’ time.
At least the Archbishops think we have a chance now to “reimagine” our shared values, so maybe we could be bold and include nature in our thinking.
Green thinking applied to housing
Let’s take one of their priorities, housing, as an example. Currently there are 28 million residential properties in the UK, supporting a population of 65 million residents, an average of 2.3 residents per property. In European countries, the average ranges between 2 and 3 residents per property, with the UK towards the lower end.
We apparently have a need, oft repeated in the press, to build something like 250,000 homes per annum for several years to accommodate the homeless, young people starting on the housing ladder, immigrants, and those on low incomes. The UK has not managed to achieve this build rate anytime in the last forty years, but let’s assume we somehow manage it for the next twenty, thereby achieving the goal set last year by the Daily Telegraph of achieving 5 million new homes by 2040 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/12/53-million-new-homes-needed-as-ageing-and-immigration-drive-dema/).
5 million new homes would of course add to existing pressure on our landscape, with further losses of green spaces and forest. (We could build on existing farmland, but that raises the dilemma of having either homes but not enough British-sourced food, or food but not enough homes.) Given that England in particular has gone from being 80% covered to 8% covered by forest in recent centuries, as the result of farming practices, this feels like the wrong direction of travel unless there really is no alternative.
Maybe there really isn’t, and people matter more than trees; but let’s imagine – as part of the reimagining process in which the Archbishops invite us to participate – that we do not build any new homes at all, and instead focus on increasing the level of occupancy of existing homes. To fit our population into the housing stock that would then prevail in 2040, without the advent of those 5 million extra homes, our average occupancy rate would have to rise from around 2.3 persons per property to 2.8 persons per property, an extra half body per dwelling. This is still within the EU range. We would feel a little more crowded but would have avoided a large number of tedious planning applications, not to mention an unwelcome increase to our already large housing footprint on the British landscape.
Climate change considerations
The UK has a very ambitious target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 from 1990 levels. Although a portion of this will be achieved by closing our coal power stations, and a larger proportion will be achieved disingenuously by importing our goods and electricity and thereby not including their impact in our national statistics (this is known as “carbon leakage”), it is still very hard to see how the target will be realised in full without a radical change of lifestyle. If we consider that the average carbon footprint of a UK resident is 10-15 tCO2e per annum, the UK’s target is to bring this down to 2-3 tCO2e per annum by 2050. That is, not coincidentally, the level which climate scientists say we need to achieve globally to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Now for a sense of scale. Per head of population, we emit nearly 1 tCO2 per annum just from burning gas in the home. That is based on the current housing stock, heating habits, and occupancy rate. So between a half and a third of our long term sustainable budget, before we consider shopping, diet, travel, etc., would be used up by the domestic boiler assuming current usage persists.
It may be that we should knock down a large chunk of our existing energy-inefficient houses, and replace them with new and more energy-efficient houses instead. But that is an argument for updating rather than extending our housing stock. If we don’t extend the stock, then we will have to increase its utilisation. It would clearly be helpful in terms of meeting our ambitious but scientifically justified target for 2050 (especially as we will be burdening other countries with all that carbon leakage) if we were to learn how to live with an extra half body per dwelling.
How do we increase occupancy rates? Perhaps the Church’s emphasis on community is a good starting point. Perhaps we need financial incentives to support households taking in lodgers. Perhaps we need a change in attitudes to home ownership (a number of wealthy countries including Germany and Austria have significantly lower levels of ownership). Perhaps we need deep-seated changes in cultural attitudes to living together in the same house …
This is of course a simplistic analysis. But it is equally – and dangerously – simplistic to talk of an extra 250,000 homes per annum, or 5 million homes by 2040, without giving any consideration to how housing fits into our climate change targets.