Westminster Council not on track to meet energy efficiency targets 28 November 2007
Posted by karenbuckmp in Local News.trackback
Recent figures produced by the Association for the Conservation of Energy showed that Westminster Council is not on track to fulfil the duty placed upon it, and all other local councils, to reduce residential energy consumption in their area by at least 30% between 1996 and 2011 under the terms of the Home Energy Conservation Act 1996.
To be on course to meet the target, each Council should by now have achieved at least a 20% reduction- an essential contribution towards cutting Co2 emissions, given that our homes are responsible for over a quarter of all such emissions nationally.
Westminster has recorded only a 7% reduction overall, leaving the borough trailing behind Kensington (also not good, at 11.9%), Brent (26.9%), Hackney (19.7%), Greenwich ( 20.5%), Hammersmith (20.4%) and so forth.
Westminster Council talks the ‘green’ talk, but has a long way to go in practice, as both these figures and the latest information on recycling rates makes clear. The Council needs to raise its game dramatically, not least by raising awareness of the assistance available to help low income Londoners.
In line with the recommendation of the Association for the Conservation of Energy, I have now written to the Department of the Environment asking that the Secretary of State consider using its powers to direct Westminster to improve its performance.
What’s new? In another part of Ms Buck’s constituency, North Kensington’s Lancaster West Estate, the central heating has remained on 365 days a year for years. If our homes contribute 25% of the CO2 emissions nationally, this is going in the opposite direction. No wonder the Royal Borough has achieved only a 11.9% reduction instead of the 20% benchmark at present.
All my efforts to address this problem took years to get a response and only occurred in June 2005 after I contacted BBC London during that heat wave. My flat’s temperature hit 40C in the heat wave of early August 2003. My faxes to the Leader of the Council and the TMO’s Chief Executive brought no response in early August 2003. That heat wave was supposed to have killed some 2,000 in the UK.
In the meantime tenant management in the Royal Borough and this Estate spent years with costs over £1 million to build 38 business units in Barandon Road on this Estate deliberately neglecting and covering up this and other residential problems.
The central heating was still not fixed properly as of the end of this past summer, but the TMO Chief Executive sails on after six and one-half years in the job to another post skipping out on the disaster he’s created here. What’s he going to do? The same thing elsewhere? He has been lauded for the “achievement” of gaining Audit Commission 2- and 3-star ratings for the TMO in the Council from its inspections in the summers of 2003 and 2006.
Former Secretary of State Ruth Kelly awarded the Royal Borough’s TMO with the Audit Commission’s “Excellence Award” before she left office earlier this year. If the Royal Borough has some 10,000 social housing units with the Lancaster West Estate’s 900 units reflecting 9% of that total, this is a major contributor to the failure to achieve the emission benchmark target at this point in time.
There is much to be said about general tenant management failure and its abuses including a complete misdirection of management efforts, but this information is an extremely important indicator of such failure. I happened to think that global warming is the single most important problem facing all of us for the future, and these targets not only should be met but exceeded. I see everyone else is doing in this list except Westminster and the Royal Borough.
My thanks to Karen Buck for reporting this valuable information, and I hope that she can get this into the Commons so that the entire nation can be assessed with regard to overall housing emission. More important, however, is the fact that government housing should be way ahead of everyone else setting an example. I sincerely hope that this tenant management disaster is not being repeated elsewhere.
Perhaps she can write to the Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment to get the Royal Borough’s confused array of tenant management organisations on the ball and functioning properly in the interest of the tenants/residents and society.
“Excellence Award” indeed!