From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
It’s hard to think of anything more damning about the King’s obsession with climate change:
A care home charity backed by the King is being forced to shut down properties because of Government net zero rules.
Martin Green, chief executive of the country’s leading social care body Care England, said on Friday that the Government had “slapped another fee” on chronically underfunded care homes by introducing legislation which will force providers to meet new energy efficiency standards at great cost.
He warned care providers across the country faced closure due to the prohibitive expense of installing more energy efficient double glazing, insulation and heating systems, expected to cost social care providers hundreds of thousands of pounds.
He said: “The Government needs to see that, without help, care homes will not be able to deliver on this without losing beds.”
It came as the 60-year-old care home provider Abbeyfield, of which the King has been a patron for more than 40 years, confirmed 43 of its homes face closure because of the unmanageable costs of improving their Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating to C by 2030.
In a letter seen by this newspaper, residents were this week told an extensive review had concluded the cost of upgrading its properties under government net zero plans was “too great” for the charity to meet, saying it had identified a number of homes “which can no longer be operated sustainably”.
Residents of an Abbeyfield home in Cornwall told local news reporters it was “one of the worst things I have heard in my life” and that the prospect of losing their home was keeping them up a night, while a 76-year-old resident of a care home in Wiltshire said she “didn’t know why this was happening”.
Charities have warned elderly residents’ lives were at risk, due to the shock of the prospect of losing their homes.
The upgrades are necessary because of the Government’s efforts to meet its target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Full story
This fiasco lies at King Charles’ door as much as the political establishment’s.
It is all very well for Charles to pontificate and issue warnings of X months to save the planet. But we are now seeing the practical outworkings of his incessant political campaign, which he began years ago.
Also coming to high street shops – in addition to housing etc.
We’ll all be on the streets at this rate
and everything will be 15minutes away…it just wont be open
was wondering how long it would take for some of chazzas idiocy to come home to roost.
QE is a great loss more so when you see this beginning so soon
I’m no fan of Charlie3 but this has nothing to do with the King
Parliament makes policies. This is the responsibility of our elected government. It’s the Tory Party demonstrating their complete incompetence again.
And the Tories are not lefties. They are as right-wing as any parties get in Europe; including Italy, Poland and Hungary.
It’s an arts graduate vs science/engineering split not a political one.
Almost all politicians come from philosophy or legal backgrounds. They understand nothing about the real world.
Maybe so. But are you suggesting that C3 wields no influence, especially with those craving royal indulgence by way of titles? The idiocy of that crowning cereomy proves otherwise – why on earth would so many of the nobility stand by while such nonsense was sprouted? Sorry, but the much lauded E2 could have put a stop to this, but failed in the most important task of her reign! I did see a glimmer of hope when she returned from a long overseas tour and merely shook Charles’s ten-year-old-hand, but she must have thought later that acting as a pricipality prince had educated him. Fat chance!
Right wing? Hahahahaha.
You have left wing, far left wing, and off the left edge of the earth wing.
I’m no fan of the wingnut king, and even less of nut zero, but it makes me wonder what condition those 43 residential homes are in that they couldn’t get them to an EPC-C rating by 2030.
Do they not have insulation, double glazing or low energy light bulbs already?
This is a big company that boasts a healthy cash and investments balance of over £25m.
Are we sure this isn’t just a convenient excuse for getting these buildings off their books?
“double glazing, insulation and heating systems”
So that’s new windows and doors, tearing the place apart to add insulation and adding an expensive heat pump etc
It isn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes but this is housing for old people by a large international private company we’re talking here, you’d think in 2023 they might of thought about double glazing and insulation already, what have they been doing for the last 60 years?
What have they been doing? Like all companies in the old folks home business, they are ignoring those residents and increasing fees and profits. Why are they ignoring the residents? They are going to die in a short time anyway.
Do you have any evidence that all companies that run nursing homes are evil?
Any provider that ignored residents would be out of business pretty quickly.
I just love the way socialists actually believe they know more about running a business than do the people who actually are running the business.
Perhaps because, unlike government, businesses can’t just print money in order to spend on the whims of the day.
When the majority of “private” homes can’t afford such changes to their own home, and thus do not have these “improvements”, on what grounds do you believe an organization aimed at providing for a large number of helpless older people must have the funds to expensively modify many buildings?
Have you visited an old people’s home in the UK? I have and I can tell you they are mostly decrepit old buildings just hanging in there with current costs of heating. For the average home of say 50 residents the costs of replacing the heating system with heat pump systems would run into the £millions.
Warmunists don’t care how much money other people have to spend. For them, the obvious solution is the one they have been advocating for since before this crisis was invented, and that is for government to take over all care homes.
Are you related to Nick perhaps.
Nobody said anything not being able to do such fixes. The issue is 100% cost. Something you and the rest of the climate change nutters completely ignore.
I just love the way you completely ignore the actual words that were spoken, and then assign an evil motive to those who have trouble affording the mandates that you approve of.
Mark said what I was struggling to find the words for. Thanks.
Social care in the UK is underfunded, and most care homes are in fairly poor condition because the funds to maintain them aren’t provided by the government in fees. They are also mainly old converted buildings which as we all know are hard to insulate etc. The vast bulk of the sector is essentially publicly funded, and consists of small providers because there aren’t many economies of scale. Most don’t make a large return on capital although I grant you a few do, mainly in the very specialist sectors where the skill set required is higher and the risks greater. Planning and regulatory restrictions also make it extremely difficult to just replace an old, worn out home with a new one – even if purchasers would pay the higher fees required, which they won’t. I know the sector well.
This is from their own website:
The Abbeyfield Society is fully committed to:
This from their own financial report:
The Society meets its funding requirements through its own resources and its bank credit facilities.
The Board has considered the net asset position of £118.6m as at 31 March 2022 and has reviewed the future viability of the Society by carrying out a detailed review of the Society’s business plan.
It has carried out a full financial and market viability process, looking at the future viability of the portfolio of the Society’s homes, reviewed the risks in the business, as detailed in the risk section of this report, and then stress-tested the outcome of these plans.
The detailed review covers a five-year period from April 2022 to March 2027.
The Board considers it has adequate resources to continue operations for the foreseeable future and carry out necessary major works and development projects.
What do I know I’m just some commie climate nut job…. apparently {sigh}
You have twigged that Abbeyfield are a charity, haven’t you? They’re also one of the largest providers of residential retirement care in the UK.
Care homes have met the industry standards to provide heating, safe, reliable housing and welfare for their residents every year up to this point. Can you not see that to force them to provide heat pumps and the sealed environments that they work in is a completely unnecessary and costly exercise with no justification whatsoever?
I don’t think any of that contradicts what I said, does it?
Only the “most care homes are in fairly poor condition” part – most are in good condition with a few being in excellent condition. The ones that were in fairly poor condition have not met the industry standard and regulations and have, subsequently, closed.
It may be a matter of definitions. Obviously to continue trading a home must meet the minimum environmental standards set by the Care Quality Commission. That doesn’t, to me, guarantee that it’s in “good” condition and it certainly doesn’t mean that it meets future environmental requirements.
When you look to the nanny state to take care of your every need, you’re bound to be disappointed.
Has Guardian gone sceptic native ?
How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’Residents feel trapped and choked by dust, while experts warn environmental damage is ‘solving one problem by creating others’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/21/solar-farms-energy-power-california-mojave-desert
Worth taking a look, photos tell the story.
Nice one..
We do know what they’re alluding to there….. dust storms at al…
By blinding coincidence, I’m just back from a micro-explore – I went to visit the river = River Nene in this case
It is an insane ‘picture’ this morning. There is a rapidly outgoing tide but quite a stiff breeze trying to push the water back inland. To the point it’s making little white breakers going against the flow.
Hypnotically dizzying to watch
You can understand how ENSO forms/works from watching it
But as usual, the water is basically just Liquid Mud – completely opaque and brown. So I went to do some research on it and found the attached.
(You can hopefully see its address at the top)
Note the highlighted bit.
First, admit that: A warming atmosphere means that Earth is losing energy
How can anything else possibly be true?
Now we understand why Greenland and Antartica are accumulating ice/snow over the last 20 & 30 years – as we’ve just read in yesterday’s stories here.
Then, realise that what causes Ice Ages is when natural soil erosion reaches its ‘climax’
i.e. When soils around the globe become so poor & infertile, plants stop growing, the plants burn and die and as a result, deserts form
Deserts being places with High Air Temperatures but No Energy (worth talking about)
Put that lot together and what do you get…
I see that ‘we’ are doing all the wrong things to ‘fix climate’ *something that isn’t broken) and as a result are hastening (by a factor of 10 or 12) the arrival of the next Ice Age.
Greenland and Antarctica are in the vanguard
edit:
Yes I see they talk about ‘models’ but you need to see the whole thing.
Their models are simply because they cannot continuously sample the river.
So they did as mnay samples as they could (6 different locations) then used models to work out sediment loads at other times dependant on known values for rainfall (thus river flow rate)
Their model was basically an Excel trendline
Ok I’ll bite.
What caused “peak erosion” in the prior 10 interglacial periods all preceding the first plough?
And what is it about a mile of ice overhead that restored the soil?
And how did that drive the ice sheets back to Greenland?
Do orbital mechanics play any role or is Milanković all wet?
I’m shocked SHOCKED to see that Peta has no response.
WUWT someone needs to train ChatGPT on the facts of CO2 and quality of life. ChatGPT needs to know the things that have gotten better with higher CO2. This would also make a great blog post.
1) Global standards of living
2) Falling Global Rate of Child Labor
3) Falling real energy prices
4) More women in the workforce
5) Higher crop yields
6) Lower global poverty
7) Lower global hunger
8) Greater leisure time
9) Life expectancy has increased
10) and the list goes on and on and on.
There is hardly a single demographic metric other than obesity and health-related issues having to do with a longer life span and better living. Why if increasing CO2 from 300 to 400 caused so many good things, by what mechanism would increasing CO2 from 400 to 500 suddenly reverse that well-established trend of improving lives with higher CO2?
Alex Epstein recently made a video where he said that after he published his most recent book- he noticed that ChatGPT seemed to pick up some of his ideas.
It just uses written language pattern recognition, therefore is going to be a consensus engine. If enough articles say there is a 97% consenus, ChatGPT will say there is a 97% consensus. Then your plagiarism will be read by ChatGPT. See a problem here ?
so then lets stop calling it AI- it needs a new name- FI (fake intelligence?)
reminds me of my senior high school class day trip to MIT back in ’67- I recall sitting in front of a terminal- the main frame had some chatty program- forgot the name- something like Eliza- it was suppossed to mimic a psychologist- it might say “how are you”- then you say “tired”- then it’ll say “why are you tired?”- as useless as most “shrinks” 🙂
I’d prefer “FA” to “FI”!
Correct. But surely you have noticed that none of the usual idiots (C3, Kerry, Gore, etc.) have admitted their error re Carbon Dioxide, and are now chasing that evil methane?
IOW: Government is now Far Too Big – compounded by its being composed of self-serving liars.
Feeding an army of Cronies.
Without that, the improvements would have happened gradually over time and at vastly lower prices/costs and there wouldn’t have been any problem
So what they’re doing is milking the old folks in same way as kids/students are being milked.
Just remove the Right to Vote from everybody who works for Government – this will become Just A Bad Dream after the first couple of elections
It was predicted……
“IOW: Government is now Far Too Big – compounded by its being composed of self-serving liars.
Feeding an army of Cronies.”
I think that sums it up pretty good.
liars, cronies, nepotism, affirmative action with special emphasis on hiring LGBT is the rule for my state of Woke-achusetts- it once had a proper civil service system- no longer- most of the state agencies are now led by women, most hiring, whenever possible, is women- hey, I like women- they should be able to apply for any job- but I believe in meritocracy
It isn’t just King Charles.
It’s not a bad idea to improve efficiency but they should have a decade to do it.
If improving efficiency costs more than you can possibly save, then it is a bad idea.
If the return on investment is so low that it takes decades to pay back the initial cost, then it is a very questionable idea.
Tearing out functioning windows in order to replace them with better windows is a huge cost. You are spending maybe $100 per window, while saving at best, a dollar or two per year per window.
The same goes with trying to add insulation to existing walls. Lots of cost, not much benefit.
Secondly, as has been documented on this site many times in the past, increasing insulation often results in other problems forming. Things like the build up of humidity inside the building, that has to be taken care of, at additional cost.
I wish it was only $100/window. I recently had a carpenter tell me it’ll cost about $600/window here in Woke-achusetts- and that’s for a cheap, plastic window.
Rather than replacing the windows- they could just put up cheap plastic sheets over them. I put those up on top of my double paned windows. Then the cost is maybe a buck/window. It takes about 5 minutes/window.
Don’t forget to include the labor costs for putting up and taking down the plastic.
Regardless, it sounds like a fire hazard.
$1800 for two windows installed.
That is about in line with what i just paid. Good windows aren’t cheap, neither is good installation.
Wow, where did you find such inexpensive replacements? Sounds like you should check for cardboard panes with a cheap coat of paint over them.
It has been 20 years since I’ve had to replace a window.
Trouble is, it isn’t to improve efficiency – most of them are efficient right now; they have to be to be compliant with industry regulation. This is to replace the reliable and efficient systems with unreliable and inefficient (in the UK) heat pumps and a sealed environment that they work with.
Having to up grade things that would create long term savings seems like a good idea regardless of motivation. But people that always have large amounts of descretionary income just can’t understand that not everyone and not every organization has that luxury. There are often competing cost and improvements needing attention that the virtues don’t see or even conceive off. So they think no big deals a few windows, new insulation new commercial scale and grade head pumps etc . And as someone who has had to do “ minor” upgrades to old buildings ; they often turn into not so “ minor cost”
And meanwhile, China, India, and Africa open a new coal-fired energy plant almost every week and plan to continue for the rest of the decade——meaning all the Carbon Zero efforts of Europe and the Anglo world are meaningless.
CO2 is rising and will continue to rise.
We need comprehensive satellite and webcam coverage of the expansion.
Whatever it takes to get rid of the useless eaters.
Fortunately, the planet will have killed me before I’m old enough to face this problem, or so I’ve been told.