My Lords, it is genuinely a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, who always gives us a master class. Whereas I tend to rely a bit too much on rhetoric, he gives us facts, which are far more robust and demanding of a government response. I shall speak to Amendment 175,
although I also put my name to Amendment 175A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, which I support. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, for their support.
It was more than 15 years ago that a member of my family opened a printing factory in Cornwall and I heard the term BREEAM for the first time: a building standard demanded at the time because it was partly financed by the European Regional Development Fund. There was a reasonable expectation—in fact, a necessity—that certain standards be built into that building. One of them concerned grey water. I remember saying, “What the heck is greywater?” The answer was that it is recycling water—not water that has gone through the lavatories, or loos, but the rest of it—to make sure that water demand comes down. It was one of the most obvious examples of what we would now call the circular economy. Those technologies can save something like 50% of water consumption.
In those days—all of 15 years ago—it would have been completely unrealistic to apply such a system to domestic houses, because they were not available at that scale. But even then, for commercial buildings, it was the case that those systems worked, and worked well—the system in that building is still working very effectively and reducing water demand. But now those systems are up for use in domestic housing as well. They work. There are criticisms of them: obviously, the cost, technically—I shall come back to that—but also that they raise the demand for electricity, and so the carbon footprint may go up. We should always remember that domestic buildings will probably last for 100 years. We know that we will decarbonise electricity generation anyway, I hope, well before 2050, so that carbon footprint will not be an issue for very long.
I say to the Government that surely we have a real opportunity here to save a major proportion of water consumption. It will not solve leakage, which I appreciate has to be done elsewhere, and there are other amendments to deal with that, but on water consumption we already have a solution which, if it is rolled out in new buildings, whether commercial or domestic, the difference on the cost of that building is far from great—perhaps a couple of thousand pounds. Over the life of that building, clearly there will be savings in both resources and the cost of water.
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It is one of those areas where it is just so obvious that we need to improve the future homes standard. I do not know where that has got to at the moment. As we have said before, it seems to me an absolute tragedy that the aim of zero-carbon homes for 2016 and commercial buildings for 2019 was thrown away back in 2015, under pressure from the then Chancellor, George Osborne; that happened along with a number of other negative green things at that time. One reason that happened, we understand, was that Persimmon Homes lobbied the Treasury extremely hard to stop those standards and was successful. I am concerned to read today that Taylor Wimpey is still putting pressure on the Government not to put up the standards that I think everyone in this House would accept are needed on the carbon footprint and resource utilisation of all buildings into the future.
George Eustice, the Secretary of State, made a Statement last Thursday, going through the whole issue of water use. He talked about leakage, business water use, water meters and bringing down the consumption of water to 110 litres per person per day in the country, but he did not say that we are going ahead with an existing, tested solution to make up to 50% water resource savings and put grey water systems into new buildings at a specific point in the future. I accept that 2023 might be slightly early in planning for this, but I am trying to be ambitious in this area. I will accept the Government saying that it might be two years later, but seriously: let us get on with this. Let us use one of the best examples of circular economy, of saving water and of saving costs to consumers, and let us move this country ahead in its building standards.