Press Release

Jonathon Porritt CBE speaks at SHAL Annual Seminar

Bridgwater based SHAL Housing held its Annual Seminar on Friday 12 October at Taunton Racecourse with an invited audience of 60 people. John Thomson, Chief Executive, said “With sustainability very high on SHAL’s agenda it was a privilege to have Mr Porritt as SHAL’s guest speaker.”

Mr Porritt said that it was good to be back in the area especially as he is a member of the Board of the South West Regional Development Agency and has been involved with the regeneration plans for Taunton.

He said that obviously there is a huge buzz around housing at the moment with the topic being a critical priority for the government and its recent announcement that 3 million new homes have to be created by the year 2030 which equates to 240,000 units a year between now and then, being a very ambitious housing programme. He said that the Sustainable Development Commission is supportive of the Government’s new Green Paper with far higher emphasis on affordability as well as sustainability and with, in addition, a target for all newly built property to be zero carbon housing by the year 2016. The deadline to build these new homes means that we have to go on a very long journey in a relatively short space of time. Mr Porritt explained that history tells us people only innovate when they absolutely have to. He said that there were clear signals from those who already want to forge ahead whilst others were dragging their feet.

He was particularly impressed that SHAL was already carrying out an experiment in two of its properties with the use of pellet boilers and that he would be very interested to hear the outcome of the experiment. The hope is that although costly to SHAL at present if the experiment proves itself by saving SHAL tenants from expensive heating bills then as more and more of these boilers were installed the installation costs would reduce.

Mr Porritt said “I really commend what housing associations have been doing to improve the energy efficiency both of their existing stock and newbuild. A recent report showed very clearly that housing associations are well ahead of the private sector in this regard.”

He went on to explain that it is vital to concentrate on bringing existing stock up to standard as well as building new because 50% of CO 2 emissions come from housing.

He mentioned that climate change is the biggest and scariest thing that humankind has had to grapple with and it was therefore vital that we should act now. He said that we should not underestimate the complexity of the need to change but should not be downcast by the challenge.

The talk was very well received by those present and no doubt, food for thought for all.