If I were consulted for policy ideas by the Labour Party, or any other political party in the United Kingdom for that matter, I would certainly ask the policymakers and policy drafters to consider the appalling toll that poorly insulated buildings has on both the health and pockets of the British people.
I would ask the people consulting my opinion if they considered insulation as a form of health and wealth insurance, and then ask them to consider that a national insulation programme was as significant as the National Health Service, which is paid for by National Insurance contributions. I would suggest to my dialogue partners that NI could stand for both National Insurance and National Insulation, and that it might be a valid policy objective to raise funds for a national insulation programme as part of the National Insurance system.
In the past, Government policy included the use of the instruments known as the Community Energy Saving Programme (2009 – 2012 : CESP) and the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (2008 – 2012 : CERT). Although the total cost of the CESP does not appear to be accurately determined, the initial Impact Assessment put it at £365 million, and the CERT total cost between 2008 and 2011 as £5.3 billion.
This has to be compared to the National Insurance revenue take, which in 2014/2015 was £109 billion. Reinstating the CERT/CESP would add roughly £1.1 billion per year to the National Insurance bill, requiring an increase in take by 1%. Surely this would be relatively straightforward to argue for, I would ask.
The problem, of course, is that as there have already been so many insulation projects and minor insulation building retrofits, all the cheap and easy things have mostly already been done – and the cost of the next insulation programme has to become more expensive, as the level of intervention required rises.
There are 26.7 million households in the UK, and without reducing this number for those households which share property, as roughly 90% of the housing stock needs a significant insulation retrofit, this amounts to roughly 24 million buildings.
If the average cost of an “insule” (an insulation installation) comes in at £7,500, then £180 billion would need to be raised to complete the programme.
If that programme were to be undertaken over 10 years, that would mean raising £18 billion a year, an increase in the National Insurance bill of 16.5%. However, the Government has within its powers to create Energy Bonds, which could have a value for 50 years instead of 10. If this mechanism were used to underwrite the National Retrofit, this would then mean an extra 3.3% added to the annual National Insurance revenue take.
I think people would vote for this.