David Chapman: How Procast is meeting Scotland’s net zero challenge

Procast Group is a strong advocate for sustainability, and we invest significantly both internally, and in supporting our partners reach their ambitions.

While we have achieved a lot, we are far from finished. It is time for action to support the Scottish Government in achieving their targets for 2045.

With the dust having settled on last week’s General Election, we are calling for parties to focus on retrofitting and technologies like air source heat pumps to be rolled out at a faster pace across the country.

Procast Group is proactive in its support to the government’s objectives, which include boiler upgrade schemes, heat pump ready programmes and a hydrogen village trial.

We have been working tirelessly with our partners, which include the Retrofit Roundtable group, assembled by the Chartered Institute of Builders (CIOB) in Scotland, to assist with putting the correct measures in place to try and hit these extremely ambitious targets.

For this to work, we are calling for the following key factors to be addressed immediately while we still have the chance:

• Set up a more simplistic user-friendly full retrofit grant scheme that can be used to blend both social, private landlords and homeowners to allow everyone access to the same level of funding. This way, a much larger scale of upgrades can be achieved.
• A retrofit hub be created in Scotland to allow a true collaboration of knowledge sharing, bringing all areas together under one roof.
• A longer grant scheme offering to allow all parties to implement a long-term strategy.
• The creation of a larger re-training and apprenticeship programme that is dedicated to the skills that are required in the retrofit market. These people are our future and we are failing them terribly at the moment.
• More power to be given to housing associations with regards to controlling The Energy Efficiency Standard for Social Housing as they, generally, look after most of the housing stock in Scotland. They have the potential to make the greatest impact if they have more control.

Tying into a recent news story regarding the housing crisis, it has been revealed by The Herald that Scotland’s councils have spent £720m of public money on placing homeless people in temporary accommodation.

Instead of accepting the status quo, we put it to decision makers that £720m would fully retrofit more than 10,000 houses across Scotland, benefitting more than 40,000 people.

When you consider there is 15,000 homeless and 95,000 empty houses in Scotland, it’s time to target these vacant homes once and for all so they are fit to a high-quality standard for generations to come.

If we are to tackle issues of housing, homelessness and energy efficiency once and for all, we believe retrofitting homes and brining vacant housing stock up to standard is the right future for Scotland.