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City of York Council |
Committee Minutes |
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Meeting |
Decision Session - Executive Member for Housing & Safer Neighbourhoods |
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Date |
30 June 2020 |
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Present |
Councillors Craghill and Widdowson
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31. Declarations of Interest
The two Executive Members were asked to declare, at this point in the meeting, any personal interests not included on the Register of Interests or any prejudicial or discloseable pecuniary interest that they might have in respect of the business on the agenda. None were declared.
32. Minutes
Resolved: That the Minutes of the previous Decision Session - Executive Member for Housing & Safer Neighbourhoods, held on 16 January 2020, be approved and then signed by the Executive Member at a later date.
33. Public Participation
It was reported that one registration to speak and one written submission had been received.
The Executive Member read aloud the comments submitted by Cllr Stephen Fenton, Ward Member for Dringhouses and Woodthorpe and Chair of the Council’s Housing & Community Safety Policy & Scrutiny Committee. His comments referred to the 24 February Scrutiny committee which received a brief report exploring the different approaches to retrofitting. Members learned that improving an EPC rating from C to B could result in an approximate saving of £700 per annum in fuel bills, which presented a compelling case for all new build properties to be at least B rated. He stated that it was unfortunate that the cancellation of the March and April Scrutiny meetings had meant that further engagement with Scrutiny could not take place before this decision session.
Cllr Pavlovic, Ward Member for Hull Road, highlighted that those who could least afford costly bills currently have cold, poorly insulated properties. To bring those properties to an EPC ‘C’ energy efficiency standard would represent a saving of approximately £260 on energy bills per property per annum and a saving of 1.1 tons of CO2 emissions. He was disappointed that the recommended Option 3 in the officers report was to achieve EPC ‘C’ for only 30 properties when there was the prospect of achieving this for 60 properties at Option 1, and urged that the Executive Member instead approved Option 1.
34. Proposed Energy Accelerator Pilot Project
Post Meeting Note: The decision taken in relation to this agenda item was declared invalid.
The Executive Member for Housing and Safer Neighbourhoods in consultation with the Executive Member for Environment and Climate Change considered a report which sought to establish a pilot project to demonstrate retrofit design specifications that can be adopted to maximise the energy efficiency performance of the City of York’s existing social housing stock
The Executive Member was asked to consider options regarding the focus of the pilot and the extent of properties that would be included. The options available were:
1. Option 1,Produce retrofit design specifications in collaboration with the Energy Accelerator programme that can be used to bring our worst performing stock up to an EPC ‘C’ rating; then roll out those models across 60 pilot properties using our existing WYCA ‘Better Homes’ Contract.
2. Option 2, Produce retrofit design specifications in collaboration with the Energy Accelerator programme that could be used to bring our stock up to EnerPHit standard; then roll out those models across 12 pilot properties using our existing WYCA ‘Better Homes’ Contract. Target properties would include inter-war terraced properties and ‘Dennis Wild’ non-traditional homes.
3. Option 3 (recommended option), Design a hybrid project with elements of both Option 1 and 2, focused on Dennis Wilde properties whereby we bring 8 properties up to ENerPhit standard and as many as 30 homes up to EPC ‘C’.
The Executive Member for Housing and Safer Neighbourhoods, in consultation with the Executive Member for Environment and Climate Change were in agreement that bringing 8 properties to ENerPhit standard would provide the opportunity to look at the various techniques involved in bringing a property to a higher energy efficient standard, serving as an exemplar to other authorities. The City of York Council would then be in a stronger position to access funding streams that support this. It was therefore:
Resolved: To design a hybrid project with elements of both Option 1 and 2, focused on Dennis Wilde properties whereby up to 8 properties are brought up to ENerPhit standard and around 30 homes up to EPC ‘C’.
Reason: Continuation with the pilot project proposal on the basis of producing retrofit specification models suitable to bring around 30 of the City of York Council’s worst performing property archetypes up to EPC level ‘C’, combined with designs to bring up to 8 properties up to the ENerPHit standard.
Cllr Craghill, Chair
[The meeting started at 11.00 am and finished at 11.27 am].