As the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) is set to be expanded to existing homes, RMIT housing and planning expert Ralph Horne has warned it must not be a voluntary scheme, and that it also needs to be independent and not be left to commercial interests.
An article Horne and his co-researchers wrote earlier this week on the topic is leading to a bigger movement in advocating for a mandatory rating.
The tool is otherwise exposed to too many vulnerabilities; he told The Fifth Estate in a recent interview.
Even within Europe, he said, the privatised versions of the mandated housing energy rating tool have caused a loss of confidence from the market because “people know it’s actually possible to bias the results”.
Horne said a quality program needs to be adequately funded to ensure the results delivered are bespoke and reflect actual conditions rather than being based on modelled data.
“As soon as people realise [the data] is wrong, it will lose its value.”
As the tool is rolled out, the existing Victorian-centred Scorecard housing energy assessment method will be phased out. But Horne is not convinced that’s a good thing, and his sentiments echo passionate support from that sector.
What’s wrong with Scorecard – and why is it being phased out?
A Scorecard assessor to his own home “did a fantastic job”, being “very diligent” and “actually stuck their head up in the loft,” Horne said.
“They checked things, they measured things and gave a comprehensive report, including proposed improvements and a star rating.”
“Why is it gone? I suspect it’s down to politics, and maybe a sense it costs too much.”
He added that there was no reason why Scorecard could not have been rolled out nationally – especially when the tool has built a large database, which would have been useful in informing future tools.
He said critically that the tool was never mandated, which meant it would not be able to successfully come up with what he calls the right language to adequately describe dwellings.
“Households have a language to describe their dwelling, but it does not involve low carbon, it does not involve performance, and it does not involve any discussion about energy efficiency or renewables as a package.”
The discourse can only be addressed when it becomes ubiquitous, when it is used amongst every single rental, purchases and sale.
“Unless we have mandatory disclosure and reporting of every dwelling, we won’t have that language… embedded in society.”
The result will be that “sources of truth” will be found in places where they should not be, such as what the brother-in-law said.
“[I’m not] asking people to go and find out the truth where no truth is available about complex things, like fluid dynamics of housing.
“Just like a star rating on a fridge, we should be able to put a rating on a house.”
Australia lags on “average” housing
When Horne arrived in Australia in 2005 from the UK, his first research was for the Australian Greenhouse Office, investigating how eight cities around the world, similar to Australian cities, were doing in terms of housing.
This includes comparing housing plans from Phoenix, Arizona, to Australia’s Perth; San Francisco Bay to Melbourne; and Florida to a tropical northern Australian city.
The results were, even back in 2005, standard volume builder houses overseas had an average rating of 7.2 stars amongst 100 homes, rated through CSIRO’s AccuRate.
US housing then was miles ahead of Australia.
“Everybody who comes to live in Australia can’t believe how bad the housing is. It is a national and international laughing stock, and yet we’re still listening to the housing lobby saying it’s going to be too expensive to go to a certain standard. It’s ludicrous.”
Horne said the government is responsible for not correcting “systemised misinformation”, which is sentencing households to paying “ludicrous energy bills” and “exacerbating climate change, exacerbating our contribution to climate change as a responsible wealthy Western nation”, and wasting money.
“I really think that politicians have got a lot to answer for in presiding over what has been a dreadful era in building policy and climate policy.”
“Countries much poorer than Australia are way ahead. Think of Southwest Europe, or Portugal, where housing quality is way ahead. People are much more intelligent in the way they talk about their homes and buildings.
“There’s a much greater understanding of why it’s why things are like they are. It is really sad that we have resources and access to this, and yet we’ve done so little about it as a nation.”
Although Horne adds that there are always particular parts of government that are doing well in housing, despite the lack of “ubiquitous language and understanding of direction that we’re going in”. He gives credit to certain local government who are doing initiatives to have “greener footing” and pioneering tools like BASIX.
“All three levels of government need to come together and crack this.”
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