Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Constructive Voices, the podcast for the construction.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: People with news, views and expert interviews. Hello and welcome to Constructive Voices. I'm Steve Randall. On this episode, we're talking about cavity wall insulation. Now, it may not be something that's sexy, it may not be something you've thought about recently, but there's a problem in a lot of areas and in a lot of properties, and it could in fact be a national scandal. Let's find out more from our guest.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Hi, my name's Damien Mercer. I'm the owner and director of Cavity Extraction Ltd.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Brilliant. Well, welcome to Constructive Voices, Damien. I'm sure most of our audience are well aware of cavity wall insulation, but just to give us a brief overview, what is it?
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Cavity wall insulation is the insulating off a property to reduce your carbon footprint. The retrofit side of cavity wall insulation is where it's pumped in after the building has been built. When you're getting a new build and they're insulated, they are built in situ so that there's usually a gap between the insulation and with a retrofit, it is a full fill cavity system.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: And we're talking particularly today about the implications of failed cavity wall insulation.
How common is this and what sort of things happen when this fails retrofit?
[00:01:31] Speaker A: Cavity wall insulation is failing at an alarming rate to me. You know, my business has been going 10 years and we've seen it grow year on year since it started. We extract from private and commercial situations like housing associations and people like that. And we're at first, 10 years ago, we were doing a couple of extractions a week. We are rattling through between 10 and 15 extractions a week now. Cavity insulation and the numbers obviously have increased because there was a government incentive of making sure that the properties in the UK met a minimum standard with their EPCs. So there was a big drive on retrofitting insulation.
And, you know, I think the last count it was somewhere between 14 and a half million properties on the UK mainland have been installed with cavity wall insulation.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: So we're talking big numbers. When things go wrong, there are impacts financially, environmentally, health. I mean, all of these things are impacted. So what happens?
[00:02:44] Speaker A: The usual thing is you will notice that there's mold or damp appearing on some of the walls, in particular in the winter months when you're trying to keep your inside your property at 19 degrees and it's minus two outside. Somewhere between minus two and 19 degrees is zero. This is the dew point. And if you have failed cavity wall insulation, it'll either fail on material in the cavity or a cold spot within the retrofitted installed cavity itself. And then when you get a dew point forming, it wets the insulation. The insulation gets wet in turn, it wets the internal or increases the moisture value of the internal envelope of the property and that causes a breeding ground for damp and then in turn mold and then the health implications that can follow that type of process, from anything from asthma, skin conditions to increases of COPD and things like that.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: And do you think this problem with failed cavity wall insulation is often misdiagnosed, particularly by landlords? If they don't bring somebody in, they might just assume that maybe an extractor fan here and there will fix it, or that maybe the seals have gone on the, the double glazing and if they just sorted that out, it would be a fix and actually it's something more serious that they need to look at.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of properties that we go to, you know, somebody has said, oh, this will be your extractor fan or you haven't got an extractor fan or you haven't opened your window or you haven't got enough ventilation. Surely as a government we should have investigated the processes of retrofit insulation, in particular cavity insulation, and what would the impact of that product be on the housing stock of the uk? Now, what we tend to find is when people misdiagnose, and they do all the time, damp proofers will say, oh, you've got rising damp and we'll come in and we'll hack off 900 high all the way around the bottom of your house and we'll give you a chemical injection and then replaster it. That's just like a sticking plaster over the problem. The real cause is you have to look for that causation and it can be anything from the wheelie bins being in the wrong place to wrongly install cavity wall insulation to the maintenance issues on the outside of the property if you're in high exposure zones. But the real problems that we have with cavity wall insulation is it's been installed in the wrong geographical location in the wrong type of housing stock. And what we're finding is we are called all the time to go out and carry out the remedial works for that property. Now, cost wise, you know, if you're extracting a property, it might be somewhere, you know, a 1940s semi detached house, for instance, to probably about 105 square meters, 110 square meters, you can be anywhere between 2,500 to £3,500 for that property. Depending on the type of insulation. So it can either be fiber or a glass fiber or polystyrene bead. There are different types of foams. There's one that's been quite prevalent in the press recently with the SSB law claims where they have used urethane foam, which is hard foam that goes off inside cavities. And the only way to remove it really is to drop the front elevation. And then the real old ones from 25 years plus, you will come across something called urea formaldehyde, which is a white foam that is easier to get rid of because it actually breaks up when you put the airlines and whips in there. As long as you have a good access point for removing it with the vacuum as well, it's really straightforward. But, you know, there is a problem with cavity wall insulation. And I think it comes down to housing stock, but it also comes down to government policies with reducing carbon footprint. And some companies are more interested in how much carbon they can harvest from your house rather than reducing your, your heating bill. And then in turn, if it's the wrong product, it will cost you more because you get a wet envelope around the outside of your property. And when you've got a wet envelope, it's harder to heat. It's the same analogy as if we went for a swim on the beach. Once you've been in the sea, you would come back out. There's no point in putting a wet blanket around you because you're never going to warm up. You, you warm up when you put a dry blanket or a dry, dry towel around you. And it's the same, it's exactly the same process. If you've got wet cavity insulation around your house, the first thing you have to do is warm up those walls which are damp or have wet cavity insulation in first, and then you will feel the benefit of trying to heat it. But as soon as that heating clicks off in the evening and the heat starts to be pulled out of your house at a rapid rate, you will notice straight away that you've got a problem. You know, a dry envelope with no insulation actually performs better than a property with failed coveted wall insulation.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Now, we've seen situations change with materials that are used. So the one that always comes up is asbestos. You know, we wouldn't use that these days. I know some countries still do. And then there are situations like the rack scandal, which of course affected many, many buildings, schools, hospitals, and that became a big national scandal. Are we talking about this in terms of just the wrong materials used at the time or with hindsight there were the wrong materials or are we in scandal territory with this, do you think?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: My personal feeling is it's a little bit of both. I think when the governments in 1992, when they signed up to the original Kyoto agreement, which is the agreements looking at reducing carbon footprint, I think that whole idea was how we're going to do that. And because we've signed up to it, there was a probably a little bit of panic because that was put onto the, to reduce carbon footprint was put onto the energy companies. And how, how are they going to do it? Well, let's use cavity wall insulation. Let's insulate inside that void. Is it the right thing or the wrong thing? I think in some situations cavity wall insulation can be an absolute asset to your property. But if you are in a exposure zone 4, so Cumbria, most of Lancashire coast, Welsh coast going down or anything on the western approaches side of the country, you are in a risk area for wind driven rain. Wind driven rain and retrofit. Cavity wall insulation doesn't really go hand in hand and I think that has been sort of overlooked by a lot of these companies. They were more interested in harvesting the carbon rather than insulating the properties. So then you know, what would be the solution? The solution is to take it out and rethink and look at the retrofit.
World needs to look at houses not on a postcode scale but on an individual basis. And over recent years we've started to go down that route. They have adopted new methods of installing better products and it's now policed a little better. But previously the guarantee companies didn't police these installs. These companies that set up as an installer and have now disappeared, you know, they've only disappeared because they're reducing their liability. Is it a scandal? I think now it is because the last 10 years we have told people about failed cavity insulation and the problems that it has and you know, at first it was poo pooed. You know, people didn't really. Well we don't believe that now they can see the actual, the problems that are caused by it. You know, housing associations are removing this product and looking for better products now to reduce their carbon footprint. Bearing in mind the housing association properties are looking to get a EPC rating of C or better. And how they're doing that, they are, they, they are looking one to improve the comfort of the their clients housing but also improving the housing stock and they might look at external wall insulation.
All these type of retrofits can be Good in certain situations. But when they were not policed like they were previously, there's problems. I was down in Westminster just Recently speaking to MPs about fail cavity wall insulation and we sort of, when they were asking me sort of the scales of this, if we're looking at 14 and a half million, which I think it's actually more, I think it's probably close to 15 and a half million now, if that is that figure. And then there was a independent study carried out by the BBA CIT over in Northern Ireland where they investigated the housing stock of Northern Ireland. And that report was an independent body that looked at it and they came up with a figure of 75% of the housing stock in Northern Ireland was either failing, failed or incorrectly installed. Wow. So those three bodies, if you transferred that over to the uk, which there is a correlation between the type of housing stock in Northern Ireland and what we have over here, 75% of 14 and a half million quid is an awful lot of homes. The scandal part of it is when they go to the guarantee company to say we have fail cavity wall insulation, they are left really high and dry because, you know, a company might come out and say, have you had your windows changed? Yes, I've had my windows changed because they were looking a bit dilapidated and you know, we've done some maintenance. Well, you've disturbed the insulation so your guarantees null and void. But then in the same terms and conditions further down the page, it says if you do not maintain your property, you will also void your.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, they got you either way.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, they've got you either way. So the paper, it's not worth the paper it's written on and these companies should have been been policed, but they were actually policing themselves.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: And I think the thing here, Damian, is that, you know, we're talking about this one specific issue, but we know that there are going to be all kinds of policies regarding reducing carbon footprint and other environmental matters. And the way that governments and policymakers tend to work is that they, they need to be able to sell it to the public and to those who have got to do the work. So they look for solutions that can be done on scale. Whether or not they're appropriate or not, they can be done on scale to keep the cost low. So this is one area and likely there will be other things that will be similar to this that are brought in by policy. They're put in place because it's a scalable solution, even if it's not the right one. So I think it's really important that you're doing the lobbying work that you're doing with government. You know, what, what did they say? Did they, did they give you any idea that, yeah, okay, we accept that this is a situation, we're going to do this, that and the other, or did they not really say anything?
[00:15:21] Speaker A: They don't really say anything. It doesn't help with every time we get cavity insulation brought to the forefront. You know, there have been mps that have had debates in the House of Commons, you know, where we've supplied information to them and we get so far with them, and then all of a sudden there'll be a general election or, you know, Rishi Sunak, he called a general election two weeks after my last presentation, talking about failed cavity insulation with a lot of people that are embroiled in this SSB law scandal. Those MPs that attended, that two thirds of them don't exist anymore. So we're basically back to square one again. They've all signed up to reducing carbon footprint. They're all sitting there pushing it, but they're not actually looking at the side effects on the possible problems that you have with cavity wall insulation. You know, I was on a Jeremy vine show six, seven years ago, he said to me, damian, your business shouldn't exist. Exactly.
If it was done correctly, installed correctly, maintained correctly and policed correctly, my business wouldn't exist.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And you've sort of highlighted the scale of the issue. And again, with sort of governments and policymakers, they like to talk about the sexy stuff. So for some people, talking about carbon footprint reduction is sexy. People who care about the environment, care about the planet. That's the sort of language they want to hear. What they don't want to hear about is cavity wall insulation, because that's less sexy. So that is part of the problem as well, that politics, particularly these days, is all about talking about those things that you think the electorate want to hear about and not talking about maybe some uncomfortable truths.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: And I totally agree with you about, you know, when they talk about the sexy stuff, you know, they like to be seen, we are reducing your fuel costs by insulating your properties. What they seem to forget is the people that they are insulating housing to, like people are in fuel poverty, they can't afford to maintain those properties. So, you know, if they get a little bit extra money in their pocket because their bills at the beginning have been reduced, they're going to spend that on things that they need that they've been missing out on. Previously that money will be re spent. They're not going to put that money into a bank account and go oh and five years time we'll have to repoint that wall. That money doesn't go, it doesn't work like that in the real world. And when the maintenance of the property then starts to fail, you then have the problems of the ingress failing the insulation. And we start, we enter this a never ending circle of chasing your tail again. Cavity insulation, when it goes wrong, it goes wrong and there is a cost implication, a cost implication that actually outweighs the saving situation. So when we are looking at fuel poverty or let's go and insulate everybody's house, it's not really the right way forward. I think, you know, there are, it needs to be looked at differently. And I'm all in favor of insulating houses and ventilating houses because insulation and ventilation should go hand in hand. But it needs to be looked at on its individual basis and postcodes or streets. One street end of the street can be higher than another end of the street might be in a valley. So you've got high exposure at the top at one end and sheltered at the other. You know when they say oh we'll go and insulate that street there. It's not always the case. You know, you need to look on an individual basis. These people need to be policed. Some government departments where when you insulate a property, your house should have a change of planning on that particular property. If you don't inform building control that you have changed the fabric of your building, you are against building and planning law. But the people that were meant to inform the local planning authority that they have changed the fabric of the building was the guarantee companies. And if the guarantee companies haven't done that within 24 hours, they are actually committing a criminal offense. So our housing stock needs to be looked at at what we've done previously and what we're looking at now. And yes, when we look at it now it's a lot better because we are trying to put things in place that didn't exist when we first started that down these energy schemes 20 odd years ago. Plus you know, we are actually, there are retrofit coordinators, retrofit designers who are looking at those houses now. But we still have, haven't changed some of the methodologies for these installations and these types of products. And we are, I think we are restocking the shelves for me to clear in years to come.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: My thanks to Damien Mercer from Cavity Extraction. You can find details of how to get in contact with Damian and his business in the show notes and that's all for this episode of Constructive Voices. Please take a moment to share it with others who may find it interesting. Follow or subscribe to get the latest episodes automatically on your favorite podcast app and rate and review the podcast if you can. You can also listen to the latest episode by saying Alexa Play Constructive Voices podcast.
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