Andrew Simmonds – Annual Conference 2023 Presentation.
Andrew Simmonds shares what the AECB is thinking and how this informs the AECB’s focus in all that we do as an association. Book recommendations form a key part of his presentation and the information from these slides are available in the AECB knowledgebase: https://aecb.net/download/aecb-conference-2023-staff-presentations/
Andrew is part time CEO of the AECB. He is an ‘environmentally conscious’ architectural designer, working with Architect, Adele Mills.
Simmonds.Mills architects’ experience covers historic & contemporary buildings, innovative/traditional materials & the development of built environment energy efficiency solutions. They design sustainable low-energy domestic & non-domestic projects to AECB, Passivhaus & EnerPHit Standards and have completed several certified Passivhaus Buildings. This includes Andrew’s family home in Hereford as an exemplar near-Passivhaus (EnerPHit) ‘whole house’ low energy refurbishment, monitored to check building environment performance & fabric condition since 2010.
Andrew leads the development of the AECB energy standards, design and construction guidance, the AECB CarbonLite Training Centre and the AECB low energy buildings database. He led the AECB team supporting the Technology Strategy Board’s ‘Retrofit for the Future’ competition, & worked with AECB colleagues, setting up the Passivhaus Trust to bring to the mainstream the work of AECB CarbonLite. He partly authored and tutors for the AECB online CarbonLite Retrofit training courses.
His approach to design and construction projects is increasingly informed by the idea that Sufficiency + Efficiency = Sustainability: a resource efficient, socially and environmentally responsible approach that is exploring what could be described as ‘radical simplicity’.
He collaborates with experts and researchers to publish papers and articles, examples include: The Wood from the Trees – towards a culture of respect with Lenny Antonelli and with David Olivier on the AECB commissioned report ‘Less is More – Energy Security after Oil’:
Okay okay so um my bit now is uh it’s not unstructured it’s what the AC what I’ve been thinking what the ACB been thinking reading talking to people in a sense to try to understand our predicament and in this sense I mean a situation we’re in which isn’t solvable
As such but a predicament is something that we have to respond to and uh within it there are various options uh some of them are better than others so before every conference I tend to think I should articulate all the sort of thinking and um reading that I’ve
Been doing to try to almost justify the ACB and what we’re doing why we’re doing it because there’s a lot of thinking about why we choose to do this or do that or focus on one particular thing over another and I thought the best
Thing to do is to sort of um well not put 100 slides up here because it started with 100 slides where I wanted to expl explain each and every book and the theories behind it and I realized quite quickly I couldn’t do that I wasted a day being silly like that um
But I thought I would show some key books which I strongly strongly strongly recommend that you read or get out from a library uh or something and why will become hopefully clear uh during this 17 slide presentation now there are graphs in here some of the graphs are simply to
Look at the shape and the pattern of the graph or even just to show what sort of things we reference maybe when there’s a climate denier on your back or um just to sort of in a in a way refresh our understanding of the situation we’re in
So some of those slides don’t worry about looking at the axes maybe the axes but don’t try don’t get frustrated if you want if you’re interested in any of them you can access this presentation after the conference so one of the most uh um influential books I would say is
John Michael Greer’s long descent and we’ll go into a bit of each how each of those books so maybe influencing ACB thinking um Jeremy lent the patterning Instinct um was another important one um the series of books by Dr Peter kkin and his his colleagues um uh looking at uh the patterns the
Repeated patterns of history and how not only what has happened but understanding it building a model in an order to predict how those patterns might be playing out for ourselves in the future um the last one I read was end times which is I think it gets people’s
Attention the word end times but you’ll see visions of catastrophe are very carefully sort of explored in in that book it’s not a gloom and doom book necessarily it’s just look at the reality of where we are and then uh maybe apply things like Relentless optimism if you must to to that
Interesting I did say that that sentence a few years ago and Chris picked up on it I can’t say that I experienced Relentless optimism very much so I was slightly taken aack he chose to to use that um this one here this world after climate change that’s an interesting one
Particularly chapter 5 it’s a bit of an academic book it’s got a price tag we have been sharing got permission to share chapter five and we did have a burst of sharing it if anyone’s interested but what they’ve done is they’ve worked with Scientists in order to understand Regional climate change
Impacts and they’ve elaborated that into a series of five or so places around the world and actually turned it into a a story but it’s scientifically informed story and that is one way of really bringing home the sort of environment we will be living whether you’re in Iraq or
Whether you’re in Belgium or uh London I found that a very powerful um piece of work limits to growth is not something I’ve I never read the original nor the 30-year update nor the 50y year update this is very new but I have read the limits to growth um
Reassess paper by uh by gay Harrington here of KPMG which is from last year and it is sobering and eye openening and very very interesting so we’re going to look a little bit at at that oh I just point out actually that um the staff on the table have got a A
List of useful ACB resources set up with a a sort of code so you can just get it on your smartphone you can get it off the ACB website of course just to remind you we do have some interesting things to read and and study so first of all is the just just
Again do this every year touching base with a few graphs so here’s the the world we’ve been where we’ve been treating as an open sewer um in this in this case atmospheric sewer uh so vertical axis is uh atmospheric CO2 parts per million uh year axis uh x axis
Is is the year out to 2020 and then the right Axis there vertical is how many tons of CO2 um we’ve been put billions of tons of CO2 we’ve been put putting out so clearly extremely tight correlation with what we’re putting out uh and the concentration on the
Atmosphere but yeah concept of the atmosphere is a sewer it is not a sewer it is a very thin layer delicate layer and then it’s not all about CO2 of course it’s also about what we’re doing to all these different uh aspects of of this planet what’s this is increasingly
Shocking um you can see the rapid even in the last last 14 years these tightly defined uh indicators of planetary Health here have gone from this in 2009 to this in 2023 so things are speeding up and this is hugely uh challenging to if not our
Mental health um at least you know at the very least our mental health now I’m going to slow down a bit on on this one lots of words you don’t need to read them um so the so the so going back to those books those influential books so the one by the ones
By Dr Peter turkin which he calls his structural demographic Theory or Cleo Dynamics which is named after the Greek goddess of the written word I think um this is a theory based calculation Theory based model and no model is complete without data so over the last
15 years him and a very large group of historians have been um cating uh historical data from as far back as they can go and putting it into a huge database called the shesha database which uh they’re also calling um uh crisis DB crisis database because it’s to do with the crisis of
Civilizations um small and large uh from the distant past to the more recent past and they have an army of trained researchers digitizing that information so that it can be basically fed into their into their model how many people have heard of Dr PE Peter turkin in this room will that
Work any of that work okay interesting he has he is getting traction there been various articles as some of his ideas have become more popular the most popular uh which preceded this was Isaac azimoff if any of you have read the foundation series as as a child um and
In fact the the latest uh Apple TV um program um Foundation series uses the same principle I’ve been able to put enough data into a model to be able to predict crises and outcomes of crises um following patterns which are well established and quite structural patterns the limits to growth model so
That is based on again it’s a a sort of theory approach but it’s based on a dynamic systems model which they called World 3 in 1973 1972 um and it’s a computer model that simulates interactions between population industrial growth food production and other limits uh of our
Ecosystems now the updates and also the most recent paper I mentioned there has shown that if you take the 1972 pred predictions about population growth and industrial production and so on it matches unnervingly well with actual measured data since 1972 so originally of course it was not what industrial Nations wanted to hear
So it was it was it was quoted wrongly and um sort of ignored to some extent it’s regaining perhaps some credibility with um you know sort of those at the top um obviously it still says things they don’t want to to hear so we’ll go a
Little bit into that in in a while um one of you’ll see that there are some um uh scenarios with different names so there’s business as usual business as usual to which has twice the amount of resources been extracted from the planet um there’s one called CT which is a
Continuous technological development so sort of um quite an extreme version of perhaps what a lot of here us here might be thinking you know if we can innovate our way out of this predicament we can solve climate change which is not something I think well most people don’t
Think is I think most of us don’t think we can solve climate change we’re going to have to live with it and mitigate it as best we can um so uh that’s the limits to growth model um their optimistic scenario the stabilized world scenario is the one that least accurately follows the data
Since 1972 which is not surprising what’s interesting I think is that it’s possible that ourselves in the ACB and many people are still holding on to this idea of what’s behind the stabilized World scenario um versus the business as usual and the continuous technological innovation scenarios but we’ll look at
That in a bit uh climate models so this is a different type of model which um you could say well you you should say scientists put in the unchanging principle physical principles and laws of nature um and test it against you know observe data ocean current movement air
Circulation um and so on so you could say that that’s a solid solid model a more solid type of model now the integrated assessment models I don’t know if you know what that is but you’ll have been looking at them for years that
Is uh a model that as I put here um is used by the ipcc and uh creates an uh sort of models the situation um uh the balance between climate and and and human activity and it models what if scenarios so the scenarios we look at and go here’s the
Peak of CO2 emissions and we’re going to be expected to do this you know one those trajectories are produced by these integrated assessment models so these use economic theory to for for the decision-making they do cost benefit type analyses they’re factoring things like Energy Technologies which Energy
Technologies we think we’re going to go with in which mixes land use changes and then all difficult societal Trends now they don’t measure economic damages or uh the impacts of uh climate change how that affects say reduction in economic growth and so on doesn’t seem to factor in adaptation cost rising sea
Levels and so on so there obviously a weakness um because the economic theory model means that we assume that people are perfectly informed about economic decisions we act as completely rational creatures so clearly that’s been pulled out by a well a lot of commentators and academics has been a serious weakness of
These models it doesn’t corly model how people people behave we are not rational perfectly informed uh economic decision makers um so George Momo blisses CX um has quoted this which also brings in this really important issue of inequality fairness inequity in everything we’re doing so he’s saying he’s describe it
Quite well the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury and as such the models we’ve just been criticizing there um encourage that way of thinking um so the theme of fairness and
Equity is something we all aspire to whether it’s a sustainable development goals or just our own sense of fairness but I think we need to be very aware that fundamentally um most of the forces play are not taking us in the direction of fairness or Equity so with the
Integrated uh with the limits to growth model for example there’s a lot of commentary in in in that and in subsequent papers that some of us will experience business as usual models which suggest more of a a collapse scenario with high levels of pollution and poor and reducing uh human
Well-being whereas others might be experiencing increased human well-being as part of the um continuous uh technological innovation model so it’s an unequal world it’s stating the obvious really but we must be careful not to think that the level of Lifestyle we have can be achieved by everyone which I think most people
Probably accept but we must also remember that it’s almost certain I think that um if we are if we are trying to pursue that model it will likely be because somebody else is being pushed down and uh supporting that for us so we mustn’t kid ourselves I think is the theme
Now in terms of like uh data and this sense of time because there was a brief flurry I don’t know maybe it’s something I we haven’t got time we’ve only got seven years to save the Earth all this sort of thing media headlines hyping up what Greta tumbo says um we have
Actually got a lot of time um and and and starting to look back at putting where we’re now in context and at the same time perhaps uh just giving us a little bit of ammunition for those people people who unrelentingly will break into conversations we’re trying to have climate denial climate change
Climate delay there a sort of useful things to um sort of Bear in mind so on the left there we can see a historical record of CO2 uh levels of CO2 parts per million over the last 800,000 years how can you measure 800,000 years you know the usual
Twitter we’re giving up on Twitter because after about three replies you get into that sort of Zone um but the point is that this is proxy data and proxy data is an important concept it’s data that can be used to suggest something else that is happening
Or has happened so ice Calles are an example you’re not measuring CO2 directly in the atmosphere because 100 thousand years ago um so proxy data is an important concept uh and only recently of course can we measure that but there again you know you’ve all seen these every time I do a presentation
Something like this in it showing that over over 800,000 years ago we have these rise and falls in concentration of CO2 until now some sort of bomb has gone off and it’s us so then if you look at the last 12,000 years which represents the hollene the period which we Homo sapiens
Have evolved and thrived not evolved we have thrived civilization has thrived in during this period towards the end of this period so what so in terms of um again sense of deep time again here you can see what’s going on with this is temperature so this is moving to uh to
Temperature yes temperature degree C so you can see something very significant is happening here and it’s taking the temperature up towards areas the highest ever seen in that hallos scene here and then of course once we start moving beyond into the future then we get talk into these uh modeled the use
Of models to start talking about some very important things for a human race and this is why I gave a little bit at the beginning about types of models and cautions about what models are telling us and how we should use them so this is sort of pulling it all
Together in terms of temperature so you can see this is 500 million years ago similar use of proxy data to bring all of this this story together but you can see over here our little tiny fraction of the timeline here you can see if we’re up at heading towards 1.5
Here this line you can see that that takes us to temperatures that were achieved in parts of the holos Pline the pl scene back here and back even further back so you can see this is this is some when people say this hasn’t happened since x million
Years ago or x hundred thousand years ago it appears to be true it’s quite profound to see that so here we go to uh integrated typical integrated assessment model here so we’ve got a a sort of increase in gigatons of CO2 being produced by our societies and some sort
Of are we peing are we not going on here and then these are the different scenarios asking us to do that now this is the unrelenting optimism bit challenge bit which I’m going to say I’m not feeling unrelentingly optimistic about this how many people in this room think this is what will
Happen hands up oh come on must be somebody technology no okay I slightly surprised by I thought somebody might might have a have a go at that so we’ve got our own graphs in the ACB you know so here’s our million tons of year put out by space
Heating um from the English building stock uh and you can see here there’s all sorts of different layers in here not maybe we have a increasing use of lower energy building standards for new build so some passive house some ACB building standard because obviously there will be some new
Building and we’ve made some assumptions about about that over time out to 2060 2075 20180 obviously the further out you get you know who knows but uh and what we’ve done is we’ve also done some rough but we still think useful Tim Martell who’s here is has helped work with me on
This so we’ve also done uh emissions from embodied carbon from the materials involved in retrofitting the existing stock this particular scenario looks at our idea of two waves of retrobit so a lightweight retrobit with a heat pump has a much lower let’s call it a carbon
Burp um than a level two retoric which is slightly deeper with more materials but there’s not a massive difference compared to business as usual not not uh improving the building stock and not putting it onto a low low carbon heating supply um So within this we’ve also assumed an increasing rate of
Decarbonization of building materials and we’ve assumed a certain sort of mix of technologies that predominant favor heat pumps moving to a sort of heat pump Rich heating system and so you can see that you know theoretically that deploying these standards in a not unreasonable manner we’re not going straight deep retrofit
Straight away it’s a sensible approach um can obviously bring our annual emissions down in a similar sort of way to we seeing here so theoretically could could be possible um and of course this one here is the cumulative CO2 So the faster you act the less the area the less amount of
CO2 ends up in the atmosphere um so basically what you’re trying to do with these sort of graphs the cumulative carbon graphs is you’re trying to bend the curve the flatter it is the better if it’s going down you’re actually taking CO2 out of the atmosphere so under the scenario we
Created here we’re slowing down we’re bending that curve flatter we haven’t stopped it increasing and that illustrates another principle that just for space Heating and buildings something has to offset that so there will be who’s going to offset that is that going to be people in Africa
Planting trees for us so we can feel that you know so these raise really interesting questions right here’s the limits to growth model so the scenarios here um you won’t be able to in the report you’ll be able to see what englishword versions of what those scenarios look like but in essence
You’ve got a business as usual assumption um which shows as you’ll see in a minute suggests a collapse of sorts we’ll describe what collapse means uh due to natural resource depletion this one here is um uh sort of going hell for leather extracting a bit more in order to increase agricultural uh industrial
Output um that one tends to suffer more from collapse due to pollution and that’s obviously part of that not all of that part of that is climate change part of that is plastic pollution and other gases and and and water pollutants and so on this one here which is one of the
Ones that more closely tracks the actual data since 72 is um is a sort of business as usual case which does use more resources but it has this exceptionally High technological development and we are seeing Innovations already we’re seeing this a lot of our members are technologically
Innovating in order to do more with less so clearly it’s something we welcome but if you then scale it up what you know is that realistic the author doesn’t think that this is realistic this just shows you the sort of connections of the model this sort of
Shows you a you know this is an attempt to create a complex model that’s not too complex to understand although they are hard to understand what’s going on inside of model is almost impossible to understand so this paper that reassessed limits to growth the original limits to growth um basically rerun the model
Checked its parameters and so on rerun the model uh put in the uh latest data and look to see what which which scenarios were’re tracking so the um the stabilized world one the one that would have been good had we started in the 70s that is the one that is is least least
Likely um so the business as usual suggest so in terms of where this where the model suggests Society will go is um if the business’s usual model is followed by our decision by decision makers it suggests a collapse now collapse in this case uh is talking about human welfare
So it’s a human welfare index bearing in mind that this is an average so some people might be experiencing perhaps relatively mild impacts on their um on their welfare on their on their lives uh whereas others will be taking out the slack and experiencing much more dramatic
Effects this is what I put here what these models Miss is distribution inequality so what the author has said is that uh fairly obviously humanity is not following a sustainable course um The observed data aligns with the business as usual twice as many resources and the continuous technological development
Um so qualifying what collapse means this reduction in human welfare um some of the characteristics of collapse are a halting growth and a subsequent decline in industrial Capital agricultural out output and Welfare within quite a short period of time so this is looking forward now within three decades so
They’re talking about this happening in quite a short period of time will I live for another 30 years I probably will so um within our lifetimes so she notes that um the current path does conflate progress with expansion so this is the debate about um endless growth versus steady state
Economies or even versions of degrowth managed degrowth um and she points out that you know that that that people who do promote endless growth are not necessarily evil you know it is a deeply held um sort of belief this really just talks about uh there’s no way around in any of these
Scenarios uh pollution increasing um climate change increasing of course they factor in um the fact that uh uh continuous technological development is expensive and it is expensive and that will have an effect within that our systems um uh even if that’s done wisely even if most sensible things are innovated but
Left of the market that even that is not necessarily uh going to be the case and they make the fundamental point that even as growth continues new limits will be met whatever those limits are it’s a fundamental principle that are always limits on a Fini planet right so coming to the um uh
Turkin and his colleagues uh theory of um historical patterns so these are the basic relationships that they factor in to the calculation method to the computer model so they focus on the state the size of the state the revenue fluxes to the state um uh the sort of debts held uh
And paid by the state particularly uh focus on instability as well so that brings in radical ideologies which follow 50e Cycles according to their their Theory um the building up of um revolutionary potential and then the sort of manifesting of that into things like Revolution or Civil War they
Concentrate on population in fact that was where Peter turkin actually started as an ecological um complex systems analysis looking at uh at populations of wolves I think it was um so in terms of population numbers the age the demographic urbanized or rural importantly relative wages and also the
Feeling of well-being you know are people looking forward to it are they angry are they feeling disen disen disenfranchised um which is also absolute and relative you know you just want a slice of a pie that’s relative uh and then important this is an important factor is elites now I
Often use the word Elites almost as a as a sort of an insult you know we need they recognize we need Elites we need Elites to to to lead us and to be bureaucrats and so on um but the importance is what happens when there are too many Elites what’s the mixture
Of those Elites you know is it beneficial to be can they get slight enough slice of the pie to keep them all happy um issues of conspicuous consumption within those Elites um and so on and Par this becomes this particularly important one here is what happens when Elites are competing for
Too few places of importance or influence or too few SL SES of the pie um and there’s lots of in the books are lots of good illustrations of what this means in reality and really this is just quickly to show that they’ve used their model to
C to look back at historical events and to see if they can predict what would have happened using the model and then compare it um try and validate it um with actually what what has been what is in the historical record and it seems fairly convincing to me but of course I
You know who am I to to judge it is just very interesting interesting but that brings us back to this issue of you know I I have colleagues who have who are questioning climate change science who have for decades not questioned it but because of the increasing lack of trust
In institutions and almost everything even some people who really surprise me are questioning things that I struggle with actually um because of the breakdown in trust and the paranoia that that engenders this it’s a big factor uh in what’s going on at the moment as I’m sure you’ll realize so Peter turkin says
Can we learn from history we can always learn from history but do we and who is we well we as our leaders um and there’s some interesting and rather bloody examples of uh of what happens for example when uh Elites are in Conflict uh when there are too many Elite
Aspirants as they as they call them you might be thinking of Donald Trump or you might be thinking of the extreme wing of the Tory party jostling for position jostling for influence jostling for wealth um there’s some examples where you know events unfold and some of them are basically massacred you know
Obviously that’s not the sort of thing that tends to happen in this country now but the same principle something must happen can you send your Elites to India to run the you know to run the Empire that is a release valve that mechanism is a release valve to give them
Something to do a chance to get rich over there um and there are things that that that our rulers can do to manage crises that arise so this graph here is again it’s a well-being index up on the left hand side time left to right and then the red line is political
Stress I think largely caused by these inter Elite conflicts things that have to be resolved between the elites themselves uh but also this this also factors in um revolutionary uh um potential we’ve seen some of that from Steven and uh uh um earlier this morning so uh where
These lines cross tends to be points of Crisis so what he says is uh we need Elites thought leaders administrators but we need them to be constrained to act for the benefit of all there making the strong argument that all complex societies encounter periodic waves of internal instability
And that will differ between times and societies but they’re similar patterns they’re very similar patterns how they work out uh depends on the particular details of that Society their ecological basis uh and and the time and belief system therein points out that there are no examples no known examples of
Societies organized as a state that ran for more than than 200 years before encountering these types of internal instabilities now how long has our society been running for it sounds like a similar sort of number um he’s been since 2010 using this model to predict uh periods of Maximum political
Instability 2020 was his last um uh sort of prediction um we know what 2020 was like I’m kind of working on the assumption that mid 2020s is Peak political instability I’ve been working on that idea since 2020 I trusting it and it is influencing how I think about doing things
Um this sort of Discord unravels trust breaks down the social contract is being stretched and strained social institutions and we’re seeing that all over the place I think all of us can see can’t we that sort of breakdown in trust and uh um belief in uh institutions
So again he emphasizes that we can potentially um through understanding our situation in a more structural manner uh we can maybe focus our political demands and actions uh to demand that uh rulers at these points of Crisis help us choose these better outcomes these possible post crisis
Trajectories so there are a number of things that our governments or American government or Chinese government could be doing which will influence what happens some of these options do include classic collapse scenarios which they then illustrates with what happened in previous societies previous civilizations um this one here looks boring actually
But I think I do prefer it to this continuing instability I wouldn’t be surprised if Britain is a take some of these probably something like that if I was to Hazard a guess uh and of course here we have this wonderful recovery uh perhaps until the next cycle
When this all gets too much I I just look around for uh ways to bury my fears in uh deep time always find it very soothing so I would recommend this this film um again any science fiction readers might have read last and first men by I think written in the 1930s but
There’s a very contemplative film um being made it’s very Arty film um it looks at Future history of mankind spread over two billion years several planets and 18 distinct human species that’s the way to put it in perspective I do recommend that okay so now to the praic uh stuff
Um so we have been working for quite a while to try to make sure our organization is resilient why because of what I’ve just shown you um you know I’m getting on uh we’re all getting on uh trustees are getting on um we need to make sure that we set the organizational
Structure up and the governance structure up so that the organization can be healthy Y and not too reliant on individuals so we’ve been working quite hard on that so we’ve been uh making sure our staff roles are better defined and we’ve been securing those people some of whom are sitting at the back
There um we now have what we consider a full complement of of staff and the organization I think is nicely rounded Chris mentioned briefly our plans to improve governance um which is a project for the next 12 months but we are starting it um we’ve been trying to do
This for a while actually but we’re really going for it now um finances are good so we must be careful not to sit it’s not massive but we do have good reserves we mustn’t sit on that so we’re trying to strike a balance between uh getting on with stuff
Building our capacity which we’ve now got with the staff and doing good useful work we have had a tendency to underspend our money and that was because we didn’t have enough people to see it through with lots of good ideas so we’re hoping that that will start to
Change but also because finances are good there is some additional capacity if we can identify some genuinely needed projects whether that’s around um food forest or Incredible Edible style projects or working with Community or looking more at the DIY self-build you know the bottom up the sort of area
Where the ACB should be more active um we’re doing a bit of top down stuff but we should be doing more bottom up stuff so in a way we’re open not to just endless ideas but to interaction with all of you as to what might be an actual
Need here how am I doing for time I feel that I might be do you know okay well four minutes I think yeah um so we’d like you to really start engaging with our level one level two standards apply it in your work if you don’t understand what it is what it
Means to you come back to us and just get engaged find out Tim Martell is now head of the standards and certification um Department as we’re calling it um so we basically have more capacity there and Tim is is heads permanently in this area here so do speak to him uh ACB
Building standard of course uh we have an interesting collaboration going with out of the United Nations environment program um which is focused around uh low energy buildings database potentially becoming an international platform for low energy uh high performance buildings uh and also they’re asking us if we want to lead a
Bit on approaches to building in the global South which is an interesting one and Huda here huda’s Workshop will be looking at some aspects of where that might might go um we’ve changed the self certification scheme for the for the um uh standards to um an approved certifier
Scheme again if you are thinking you can self certify anymore you can’t but you if it puts you in an awkward position speak to Tim and we’ll find a way through it but meanwhile be aware that uh your clients need to commission an approve certifier from now on and that
Also covers approved modeling so looking to make the scheme a bit more scalable um uh and I think this some some this drawing here this is a very quick attempt this week just to put down the standards that we’re promoting the way of sort of improving buildings and building new
Buildings in the right way the first time into a sort of Continuum so that people can see how the different opportunities for clients or yourselves to sort of get on board think ahead plan ahead in a structured way but actually to start doing things so we don’t have
To jump in with a deep r fit or an nfit standard there are pathways through that allow people in different situations with different amounts of capital different technical abilities different access to builders you know the skills you need um I’ve printed a few of these out and they’re on the back um table
There I would be interested anybody who wants to just put it on a table write some notes on it you know this is rubbish I don’t understand this bit this is a great idea how about this please just whatever we can get out of you just
Put there’s about five sheets of this um I think in that it should be fairly evident what we’re trying to do with our different stepped standards so really just in conclusion I’d ask you to engage with us more and see what we’ve got and just run with it some members are really
Doing that but if you haven’t been you know please just go for it okay sorry to run over thank you