Page 2311 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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efficiency assessors part of one of the occupations that are regulated by ACTPLA. This, I would have to say, is a substantial step forward. They previously were not regulated at all.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, I am pleased at the improvements that have been made in this regard. But there is a bit missing here from a bureaucratic point of view. There is no code of practice yet for the energy rating assessors. We need to get this work done.
One thing which I have had a number of emails about recently is the fact that there is no way you can pay for a part-year licence at this stage. As the arrangements commenced on 1 March, which is in the middle of the year, everyone has been slugged for a full year’s licence fee when they have not had a full year’s licence.
My next point is that the energy efficiency ratings for existing houses under the Civil Law (Sale of Residential Property) Act 1997 still require the use of first generation software. I must make a brief mea culpa. We actually forgot that should have been the sale of premises act 2003, because the act was updated at that point. However, the point is still the same. We have been looking at the act. It still requires first generation software, because this was actually originally passed in 1997. It was passed as part of the legislation. They should have had something by way of regulation to enable you to change the software, but that was omitted, unfortunately.
Lastly, I note the progress on the implementation of my energy efficiency rating motion, which was passed in the Assembly 1 April 2009. As I have mentioned throughout my speech, I am very pleased at the progress which the government is about to make in terms of auditing energy efficiency ratings. We now have the CO(L)A framework and we have some money for energy assessors. So I am hopeful that soon a lot of the complaints will go away. It would have been a lot better had this happened a year ago. What has happened is that people have lost a degree of faith in the energy efficiency ratings because they have not been audited; so they have not always been reliable and accurate. That is a real pity.
Moving on to the second part of my motion, these are the things that I am calling upon the government to do. The first one is to require household energy efficiencies to be provided not only in the current star rating, but also as a separate expected energy use for the whole house for a year, probably in megajoules per annum, as is done with appliances.
What I am talking about here, as I mentioned earlier, is that most people think a five-star house means, “Okay, great; it will definitely use less energy.” What they do not appreciate is that the five-star rating, the six-star, the zero stars, or whatever star it is, is on the basis of a rating per square metre. It is based on the building fabric—whether it has got insulation, where its windows are, its orientation. But it does not actually tell you precisely how much energy will be used, because size matters. This is something in which size actually does matter.
If you have got a five-star house which is 100 square metres compared with a five-star house which is 200 square metres, all other things being equal, you would expect the bigger house to use twice as much energy. But people do not realise that. They see
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