Row over plans to relax Merton rule
September 3, 2007
A row has developed over government plans to relax the Merton rule, which has been adopted by around 150 councils and requires any new buildings to reduce carbon emissions by 10% through the use of renewable energy sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines.
The Merton rule was introduced in 2003, by Merton Borough Council, the first local authority to implement the condition.
In a statement, the British Property Federation (BPF) said it had backed government plans to relax the Merton rule because investing in inefficient onsite renewable energy sources is "simply not the best way to reduce carbon emissions".
The BPF said the Merton rule had been a failure and requiring a building to generate 10% to 20% of its energy through onsite renewables was a far less efficient way of cutting carbon than by investing in the energy efficiency of buildings.
The BPF said that developers were calling for "broad-minded thinking rather than straight-jacketed targets designed to grab headlines and tick boxes" and claimed that for many developments, measures such as wind turbines or solar panels were useless at fighting climate change.
The BFP said: "In London especially, there is little wind, and similarly, the carbon saving of small-scale solar panels is simply not cost-effective. In many cases it would be much better for buildings to purchase green energy from off-site sources able to generate low- or zero-carbon-emitting energy on a larger, more efficient scale."
A report in The Guardian on 20 August 2007 said that the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) had been "under pressure from housebuilders who do not want to bear the cost of adding things like solar panels to the buildings they construct or the effort of marketing them as ‘green’".
The controversy centres not only on the plans for the actual relaxing of the rule but also the process of the redrafting of the regulation, amid reports in the media that neither the Renewable Energy Association nor the Micropower Council were invited to a stakeholder meeting on the subject, which was recently held by the DCLG.
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