You can damn oil companies, abuse cars, insult nimbys, kill cows, befoul art galleries. But you must never, ever criticise the worst offender of all. The construction industry is sacred to both the left and the right. It may be the world’s greatest polluter, but it is not to be criticised. It is the elephant in the global-heating room.
It’s hard not to feel as though we have a blind spot when it comes to cement, steel and concrete. A year has now passed since the UN’s environment programme stated baldly that “the building and construction sector is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases”. The industry accounts for “a staggering 37% of global emissions”, more than any other single source. Yet it rarely gets the same attention as oil or car companies.
Everywhere, building anew is revered. In her budget last month, Rachel Reeves refused to end the 20% VAT imposed on the refurbishment of old buildings, while continuing to exempt new ones from VAT. This amounts to a subsidy for polluting, carbon-intensive activities, much like her failure to index fuel duty. She is doing so because she and the prime minister, like the Tories before them, are putty in the hands of Britain’s powerful construction and oil lobbies. In his party conference speech, Keir Starmer promised to “bulldoze” local planners who impeded developers. He wants to build 1.5m new homes, and defies locals who oppose him. He even harks back to the 1940s and 50s in planning new towns in the countryside, the most carbon-costly, car-reliant form of development imaginable.
Of course, Britain needs more homes, and many of these are likely to be new ones. Yet there is plenty the government could do to free up houses. Britain’s regulation of its existing building stock is atrocious. Council tax bands have been frozen since 1991, meaning people rattling around in homes that are too big for them are discouraged from moving. A million homes in England are now estimated to be lying empty and millions more are underoccupied. Deterred by the VAT that applies to refurbishing existing buildings, developers are allowed to demolish 50,000 mostly reusable buildings a year. The release of their embodied carbon is colossal.
A much greater conversation is needed about the merits of constructing new homes versus retrofitting existing housing stock. While Labour has pledged to build 300,000 eco-friendly new homes each year, and is expected to tighten environmental standards for construction projects, the housebuilding lobby will fiercely resist any changes. The dominant cry is still build, baby, build. Rarely is it “convert”, “retrofit” or “reuse”. There are plenty of reasons we should be wary of this simple mantra, aside from the climate costs. Building lots more houses in south-east England would only worsen the widening gap between north and south, for example. Towns awash in brownfield sites need restoring, while villages should be allowed to grow organically, rather than being forced to swallow giant housing developments.
Starmer is relying on his energy secretary, Ed Miliband, to mitigate the emissions from his construction boom. The latest astonishing proposal is for western Europe’s biggest solar panel farm in the Oxfordshire countryside. It will utterly destroy this area, passing through 15 villages. Britain needs renewable energy, but this should be planned according to national priorities, not allowed to deface the countryside wherever a landowner chooses. And if we are to reduce our impact on the environment, we surely also need to be taking a closer look at properly valuing and zoning the rural landscape in general. Bulldozing all sense of town and country planning to appease a commercial lobby is a shocking abuse of the last shred of local democracy in Britain – the public’s right to some say in the physical future of its communities.