Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)
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I was asking about the public piece, the vacancy embodied and accounting for the full life cycle. I refer to accounting for emissions from demolition. As a follow-up query, regarding the European heritage green paper, we have focused a great deal on the new skills required for retrofitting and inspection, and accounting in that regard, but we must also consider older heritage and craft skills. The good news is that this undertaking is employment intensive. The activities involving heritage and craft skills were time intensive and for that reason they fell out of use. The European green paper on heritage and climate has some concrete ideas in this regard. I would be interested to hear comments on this aspect of the matter.

I have two more weird questions and then Ms Lindblom can answer. One concerns sunlight. Theories of sunlight are grievously omitted in local development plans and strategies. It is one of the gaps in how compact growth is designed. Compact growth seems to be designed without a theory of sunlight. Sunlight is important concerning energy emissions, because if we have buildings that do not get light, if there are effectively tunnels in the city that are dark all day long, that means electricity will be used for most of the day. I ask Ms Lindblom to comment on the importance of the theory of light and sunlight regarding emissions.

Finally, and to follow up the Chair’s point, we cannot afford to be installing new fossil fuel boilers. We certainly cannot afford to do so in public buildings or in publicly procured or supported buildings. Retrofitting to systems that use gas has been spoken of, but that seems to be another example of a situation we will need to retrofit out of soon after initial installation.