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England’s national heritage body will encourage local councils to allow heat pumps, solar panels and other retrofit measures for Europe’s oldest housing stock, in new guidance seen as a turning point by climate and building experts.
Historic England, a public body, is a main source of advice for many local government officers who vet changes to heritage-listed or conservation area homes, which account for an estimated 5 per cent of total UK carbon emissions.
Individual conservation officers, with wide discretion for approvals, and varying rules across England’s 317 councils have proved a significant obstacle to development of green skills and businesses, now being prioritised by the newly elected Labour government.
“Right now a builder looking to retrofit two similar homes in neighbouring council areas could face very different planning decisions,” said Cara Jenkinson, co-chair of the National Retrofit Hub’s working group on skills.
“With a shortage of builders skilled to undertake retrofit work, this presents yet another barrier. This guidance from Historic England should help councils make more consistent decisions.”
The publication of the updated guidance on Tuesday coincides with “greater certainty” from the new government on national climate change strategy, said Ian Morrison, Heritage England’s director of policy and evidence.
It explicitly encourages heat pumps for historic homes for the first time. The systems, which exchange air for heating, have been discouraged for older homes unless they are out of public view and positioned at least a metre away from neighbouring buildings.
A draft of the guidance, seen by the Financial Times, notes that “having an effective low carbon heating system is one of the best ways of enhancing a historic building’s energy efficiency”.
“In the majority of cases, replacement of existing systems will not cause harm,” it adds. The aesthetic impact “can generally be minimised through careful siting, design and screening,” it says.
Some 4.4mn houses, representing around 20 per cent of the total housing stock, were built before 1919, according to Historic England.
Morrison said heat pumps were “an effective solution for most historic buildings if designed, installed and used well”, and was critical of some negative press that favours gas-fired boilers.
Aadil Qureishi, chief executive of Heat Geek, a heat pump installer and training start-up which is providing a case study for Historic England’s website, said the new guidance was “a game-changer”.
Other industry figures argued that the document was a welcome first step that did not go far enough.
Andrew Madge, managing director of Gowercroft, which supplies heritage windows, said that while the advisory body had responded to industry submissions by adding vacuum glazing to the options for window insulation, it missed out “critical factors”. It was wrong, for example, to state that “stuck-on or applied glazing bars rarely replicate the character of historic windows and are unlikely to be acceptable”.
Historic England said “supporting technical guidance would be revised and updated as and when new information becomes available”.
