The presentations from the Edge Debate “Politics of Carbon Emissions Data” held at Ecobuild are now available on the Edge Website http://www.edgedebate.com/?p=1827
Edge Debate 55
Aside
Reply
HMRC in Meltdown
For once I’m not writing about the environment or the construction industry, but an issue that will affect virtually everyone. I had a long conversation with my accountant yesterday about the implications of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ (HMRC) new requirement for real time reporting of payroll taxation.
From April all businesses must report to HMRC the payroll deductions and payments made to all employees on the day that the payments are made! This is to be known as Real Time Information or RTI.
Back in 2010, HMRC told Channel 4 News that over 40 million UK employees pay tax through PAYE. That means that presently UK employers will submit 40 million annual returns during the 6 weeks following the end of the tax year. From April, UK employers will submit 40 million RTI returns on the last Friday of the month every month!
HMRC is of course introducing a new IT system to allow all the RTI to be submitted online. But remember back in 2008 when HMRC mandated online filing for personal tax returns? On the filing deadline day HMRC’s servers crashed with just 104,000 people accessing the system, leaving 10,000s unable to do so. Do we really believe that just 5 years on HMRC have developed a system which will be able to handle a 400 fold increase in submissions and do it every month reliably?
Also woe betide any employer who makes a mistake in either the calculation or the payment amount. Penalties will apply immediately for any inaccuracy in the RTI reporting. Businesses previously had the opportunity to correct any mistake at the next month provided that the end of year returns were correct. Back to the 2010 Chanel 4 News piece and HMRC also reported that the were 5.7 million mistakes in PAYE calculations and payments. This would be an average of 475,000 mistakes per month, clearly a nice little earner if penalties were applied to each one under the new system.
However, note also that last year HMRC left 1 million letters unanswered. If actions on payroll errors are going to be piling up at a rate of around 1 million every two months, I wonder how long it will take the RTI system to collapse under the backlog? Does anyone want to take a bet with me? I give it six months.
When Ecobuild Ends
Unbelievably I think that I may have been proved right about something. I have often questioned the sustainability of Ecobuild now that it is a corporate behemoth (most recently here). I felt sure that the levels of waste involved in this sort of exhibition was anathema to the sustainable agenda it purports to advocate.
Well, I was passing Excel this morning on the DLR and spotted skip trucks lined up on the external loading gallery. Ecobuild finished last week and the next event starts on Thursday. (Which, by the way, is the Big Bang Science Fair and well worth attending if you can.)
I thought I detected something vaguely familiar about the contents of the skips, but I’ll let you be the judge.
Ecobuild photographed 6th March 2013
Ecobuild photographed 11th March 2013
Excel in the snow
TFL
Aside
Doug has been engaged by Transport for London to look into performance issues with a heat pump installation in one of their recently occupied office buildings.
Low Carbon People
MP Don Foster announced at Ecobuild this week, funding for a programme by the Zero Carbon Hub to investigate why energy consumption in low carbon dwellings is higher than expected. The answer is apparent in evidence also available at Ecobuild pointing to the obvious, which the industry and policy makers continue to fail to recognise.
On Tuesday, Ed Davey defended the Green Deal in the face of poor take up and a recent YouGov survey which revealed that the majority of householders have little interest in energy conservation and believe instead that the energy companies should be forced to lower their charges.
In the Edge Debate on Politics of Carbon Measurement, on Wednesday, Lynne Sullivan showed that actual energy consumption in Passivhaus dwellings is 90% below the average and substantially below the best of the rest.
So the reason for the performance gap between prediction and actual outcomes in low carbon homes should be obvious to all:
Passivhaus homes are voluntary. They are built or commissioned by individuals who are already concerned about their carbon footprint and are therefore pre-disposed to a low energy lifestyle.
The Code for Sustainable Homes, Building Regulations Part L et al are well meaning in intent, but the people who will buy the homes are no more interested in energy conservation than the average Briton. They will happily leave the heating on and open all the windows.
Studies of low carbon refurbishments by social housing landlords have already shown the vast variation in energy consumption in identically refurbished flats that occurs simply as a result of lifestyle. In some cases this variation is so great that it actually masks the improvement in efficiency achieved in the refurbishment.
The message is clear. Personal preference and individual behaviour is what drives energy consumption or conservation, not fantastic building fabric energy efficiency standards, nor regulation or checklists and not energy bills (at least yet).
When are politicians going to finally wake up and admit that the climate change and energy crisis is down to the way in which we all behave, not the buildings we behave in. If we want to make any substantial progress on sustainability it is time to start apportioning blame where it really belongs: the workmen (and workwomen) not the tools. Then we need to get on with changing people’s attitudes towards energy.