Building Expertise: Identifying policy gaps and new ideas in housing eco-renovation in the UK and France

摘要

In order to meet national carbon and energy savings targets inboth the UK and France, the housing stock needs to be renovatedto a high standard of energy efficiency. However, currentlevels of activity are nowhere near sufficient to meet 2050targets. The aim of this paper is to identify the policy gaps regardingeco-renovation in the UK and France, and to highlightsome promising ideas which could successfully fill those gaps.First, different definitions of eco-renovation are presented, andthese aspirational standards are compared with current policygoals. Then a brief description of housing and energy use ineach country provides useful background information, andsimilarities and differences between the countries are identified.Summaries and comparisons of current policy are presented.The mechanisms the policy instruments aim to use toeffect change are compared with what is known about ‘barriers’to eco-renovation. Most policy focuses on reducing the costto householders, much less is done to address other reasonsfor inaction such as lack of information, motivation or trustin professionals. Multiple gaps in current policy are identified,including lack of a roadmap to reach 2050 targets, lack of policytackling non-financial barriers to action, and insufficient policyworking with the building industry and other professionals.Case studies of a number of innovations in information provisionand delivering eco-renovation are briefly presented. Newpolicy ideas around eco-renovation are discussed, particularly‘over time’ eco-renovation. These new business and social enterpriseinnovations and policy ideas could help filling in somepolicy gaps, but more remains to be done to achieve the verychallenging task of renovating the whole housing stock to ahigh standard.