By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
Families are stranded in damp and mouldy properties because of a state-backed green energy scheme.
Thousands of low-income households were offered free insulation, double glazing and a boiler in a drive to cut greenhouse gases.
But contractors bodged the work so badly that sodden walls are sprouting mushrooms. The builders have now gone bust, putting ministers under pressure to pay for repairs to the 387 homes in Preston.
Campaigners fear that as many as a million homes renovated under the ‘Green Deal’ might be affected.
Residents in Preston’s Fishwick estate were offered the work by door-to-door salesmen employed by the big energy companies, which were under pressure to meet energy efficiency targets.
In 2013 entire rows of terraced houses were swathed in several inches of polystyrene insulation topped with pebble-dash rendering.
Occupants were soon complaining of severe damp in their front rooms and surveyors said the work had been bungled. Rainwater was seeping in through gaps before becoming trapped in the brickwork.
Some owners have been quoted £40,000 to repair the damage to homes worth £90,000.
In 2014, the company behind the main insulation scheme, InterGen, was ordered by energy regulator Ofgem to repair 62 homes at a cost of around £1.5million. But in a statement yesterday, Ofgem conceded it had ‘since become apparent that the problems with the work are more widespread’.
‘Unfortunately at the time of our settlement with InterGen, we were only aware of problems with 62 houses – so the agreed settlement with InterGen only required them to resolve these complaints and did not include any further issues that might arise,’ it said. It said it was ‘still looking at other options’ to assist Preston residents whose homes had been blighted.
Preston council, which has been working to help residents despite, it says, having no legal liability, said it had exhausted all avenues and only the Government could help.
Sir Mark Hendrick, who is the city’s Labour MP, highlighted the issue during an adjournment debate in the House of Commons last month. He said it ‘had been an absolute tragedy for those living in those 387 houses, who have been trying to put up with substandard housing and great inconvenience’.
In response, energy minister Claire Perry branded the saga evidence of a ‘strong failure’ by the Labour government which introduced the Green Deal. She promised to work on a solution.
More than eight million homes have been insulated over the past 20 years under a range of government-backed schemes to cut carbon emissions and reduce bills. Many have had cavity wall insulation retrofitted, rather than externally as was done in Fishwick.
But experts last year warned as many as 1.5million of these properties had been blighted by botched work, causing dampness and crumbling plaster. The insulation industry body said this claim was ‘wildly inaccurate’.
A spokesman for the Government, which scrapped the Green Deal in 2015, said: ‘Energy-efficiency measures, including insulation, need to be installed to a high standard for the benefits to be realised, including cheaper energy bills and warmer homes.’
The spokesman said ministers had brought in a new quality mark and a requirement for guarantees to be provided.
It appears however that the problem is not a simple one of cowboy contractors. Jeff Howells, the Telegraph’s property columnist has been writing about the issue for years. Below is a piece he wrote in 2015:
It’s not often that this column’s influence extends as far as Parliament. But an issue that I have been warning readers about for many years – cavity wall insulation (CWI) – was debated at some length at Westminster last week.
I cannot claim full responsibility for this. All I really did was introduce to each other three Telegraph readers – Pauline Sanders, Claire Eades and Dianna Goodwin (who featured in this column last October) – whose homes had become damp and mouldy following the injection of insulation material into their cavity walls.
Together, these three formidable ladies formed the Cavity Wall Insulation Victims Alliance (CWIVA) and have been lobbying the insulation industry, trading standards departments and their MPs to try to get justice for the many people whose homes have been blighted by this ill-advised practice.
His article is long and quite technical, but this section seems to sum up the root of the problem:
The industry and the Department of Energy and Climate Change claim repeatedly that CWI is almost always successful, and that only a tiny proportion of installations go wrong. They have no way of knowing this, because there has never been any follow-up testing.
I believe CWI problems are vastly under-reported, and that many more will come to light in the coming years.
Most dampness problems do not show up in the first few weeks following installation – they become apparent after two or three winters, or even longer. Some customers will have dampness and condensation problems that they do not realise are caused by the CWI, and will therefore not have reported them to anyone.
Others have not noticed any physical symptoms, but neither have they seen the promised reductions in their fuel bills (this is because wet insulation does not prevent heat loss, and can even draw heat out of a house, in the same way that a damp sweater makes you colder than no sweater). And there are many CWI victims who have reported problems to their installers and to CIGA – sometimes repeatedly – and simply never received a response.
What is needed is long-term monitoring of walls that have been filled, by taking samples of insulation from the cavities and measuring their moisture contents.
It is not true that only “unsuitable” walls can suffer from damp cavity insulation. As a former bricklayer, I know that no wall has ever been built well enough to withstand wind-driven rain. That is the whole point of the cavity – to stop rainwater crossing to the inside.
Moreover, even in sheltered areas, retrofit CWI is likely to cause problems, because its installation is contrary to the basic scientific principles governing thermal insulation.
Thermal insulation in dwellings requires a vapour barrier to be fitted on the “warm” side of the insulation, to stop moisture-bearing air from inside the dwelling finding its way through to the “cold” side and condensing out as liquid water.
Retro-fit CWI cannot allow for the fitting of a vapour barrier. Therefore it must result in interstitial condensation in the depth of the wall. Retro-fit CWI is a scientifically unsound idea.
Some six million UK homes have had retrofit CWI, and a large number of these are likely to suffer associated dampness problems at some time in the future. It is possible that the mis-selling of CWI will come to rival the Endowment-selling scandal, or even Payment Protection Insurance.
It is the whole principle of retrofit CWI that is fundamentally flawed, if Jeff Howell is right, and not just a few rogue contractors.
Not for the first time it seems, successive governments’ obsession with their green agenda might be causing more problems than it is supposed to solve.
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November 11, 2018 at 01:00PM
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