‘£8 billion’ needed to make Leeds’s homes carbon neutral

Coun Neil Walshaw (Lab) made the comments during a meeting of Leeds City Council’s Environment scrutiny board this week, where the city’s plans for tackling climate change were discussed.

Coun Walshaw, who chairs the city’s climate emergency board, said the council had to get the message through to government that “dynamic” change on a huge scale was needed to avert climate catastrophe in the coming years.

“This may stun and sock people, and it should,” he said.

“But to retrofit the housing stock of Leeds, it would cost around six-to-eight billion pounds to make housing effectively carbon neutral.

“At this time, I don’t think anyone in the country is quite prepared for the scale of this and what it needs. We need to communicate the sheer nature of change the government is going to have to face to let us be dynamic in the face of this.”

As a measure of comparison, Leeds City Council’s entire revenue budget for the coming year is less than £500m – a sixteenth of the total money that Coun Walshaw believed would be needed.

A report which went before the councillors claimed work was needed to make homes more energy efficient, using £4.1m of government money. These “super insulation” to walls and roofs, high performance windows and doors and renewable technologies such as air source heat pumps and solar PV.

The improvements had already been made to 190 council houses.

The report stated: “The pandemic has had complex effects on emissions. For example it has significantly reduced emissions from the private car as traffic levels across the city dropped but it has also significantly reduced the use of public transport.

“Schemes such as the district heating and transport schemes have been able to progress more quickly due to the reduced traffic levels but others have been slowed down due to the impact on staffing level and/or the ability to complete works within private residences.

“As we start to emerge from the pandemic, we must focus on consolidating the trends that have supported such a rapid reduction in emissions such as increased home working and we must look to rebuild the economy with a focus on long term sustainability.”