devonwoody
Established Member
I have often wondered why there is sometimes three or four BG vans outside a property down here when they are doing a job. At nearly 4k I can now see why.
LAST WEEK, David Cameron and Nick Clegg were lamenting that house-building is at its lowest level since the 1920s, just when we desperately need millions of new homes (not least to accommodate the 250,000 immigrants flooding into Britain each year, as a result of policies they both support). Neither mentioned, though, that one major obstacle to any improvement in the figures is their own Government’s building regulations, already being phased in. These decree that, by 2016, all new homes must be “zero carbon” in terms of energy-use and emissions. According to official estimates in the Code for Sustainable Homes, this will increase the cost of building a house by up to £37,793.
In rural areas, where there is already a serious housing crisis, this will be made still worse by the Government’s wish by 2013 to abolish the “Fuel Factor”, a relaxation of the rules for new homes in places without access to the natural gas grid. New houses built in outlying areas will no longer be allowed to install oil or gas cylinder-fired heating but will have to rely on wood pellet boilers or “heat pumps”. A paper submitted to the Government by Calor points out that a polluting wood-fired boiler costs £11,000, while “air-source heat pumps” (£15,000) and “ground-source pumps” (£18,000) have both been shown to be seriously inefficient.
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