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MIKE RIGBY: Thank you all very much for coming and making the effort on behalf of the industry. I say that because the debate really is for the industry rather than for individual firms, and we’ve tried to get a pretty balanced spread of people who can actually talk about the industry as a whole and the various cultures in it.
I think one of the things that struck us was that it’s obviously a measure of the importance of the topics and perhaps the topicality that so many senior people have given up their time to attend. Certainly, I thank you for all of that but, interestingly enough, it wasn’t actually that hard to persuade people to come.
The debate certainly has caught the attention of the industry; it seems to have struck a chord. I’ve had my ear bent and almost torn off by some people who really felt they should have been here. There’s obviously a difficulty; you can either have a seminar with a couple of hundred people attending and then you don’t have much of a debate, or you have a debate. Well, we’ve gone for a debate, and you’re limited in numbers then to the number who can speak. In fact, the interest has been such that we’ve already had a letter to The Fenestration News - I don’t know whether Richard has had the letter as well - but it was written by a renegade conservatory guy. He actually calls it a rant rather than a letter, and he mentioned several people who he felt should be here. Interestingly, one of them actually is here: Mike Jackson has come along. Of the other people mentioned, one of them is in the States at the moment. Some others have said, “Is there going to be another debate? How can I participate? Put me down on the shortlist, I really want to do this”. So, there’s been an enormous amount of interest.
One or two names have changed from the list you originally got. Alex Main has stepped in for Scott Haslingden of Promac. Alex McNutt of Anglian had to attend a shareholders meeting but wants to be at the next one.
David Leng of Eurocell had to attend a board meeting that was moved. Mark Buckley, the Managing Director of Shepley, is away, but he wants to be on the next one. Martin Randall of Crystal Direct had to pull, too. I’d like to welcome Peter Hunt from Millenco who stepped in for Nigel at the last minute. Other people specifically who would have liked to have been here were: John Ogilvie of Network VEKA; Andy Jones of Edgetech; Graham Bailey of Business Micros; Roger Benton of HOPPE.
So, lots and lots and lots of interest and I think you can take it that we will be holding another debate on this. It’s clearly something that the industry feels they need. I’ll just pass you over now to Sam Kennedy, Managing Director of Spectus and Richard Schwarz of The Glazine.
SAM KENNEDY: Thanks, Mike. I think this is the first debate the industry has actually carried out. We had dinner last night and David (Ruzicka) was saying, “You’re a very brave man to try and do this”. But I think we’re in a situation now in the industry where we need to talk and we need to talk as individual suppliers to the industry itself. When you’re planning industry events such as this, it is inevitable that there’s an air of uncertainty and, dare I say, even suspicion as to the motives and objectives of the forum itself. I’ve asked myself, “Is this specific to the industry or is it another peculiarity of commerce and trade in the 21st century?”
I’m known for giving quotations at presentations, but I’ve got this quotation here which I think sums it up. It says, “People in the same trade seldom meet together even socially but that the conversation eventually ends up in conspiracy against the public or, in some circumstances, to raise prices”. Now, interestingly, that quotation was taken from The Wealth of Nations written by Adam Smith in 1776. So, it’s not a new factor in industry and in commerce itself.
I think we all agree that the problems we face as an industry are far divorced from the sort of seminal philosophy of Adam Smith, but today we’re confronted with new legislation, climate change, saturation and maturity, plus consolidation and rationalisation of all the supply chains. New products and new markets have driven massive changes in recent years and more is to come. Now, is this an environment conducive to investment or is it a signal to exit? We’ve called the debate “Old Roots; New Routes” because the industry is at a turning point and we’re leaving the familiar behind and entering uncharted waters.
Many of us fear what’s happening and are gloomy about the prospects of the industry itself, but I think many others would share my view of the opportunities before us as being at least as exciting - and this may be something for debate later on - and attractive as those in the 1980s. I’ll be interested to see what your comments are. I’ll hand over to Richard now.
RICHARD SCHWARZ: I’m Richard Schwarz, Publisher and Editor of The Glazine. I was also the Editor of the Glass Age magazine for some years and I joined that in 1985.
I just want to echo what Mike said about the uniqueness of this event. In the 20-odd years that I’ve been in business there’s been nothing like this that I can remember. It’s unique for a number of reasons, not least the calibre of the participants - myself excluded, obviously - and also the line-up of discussion topics we’ve got, I think, are very “of the moment” and strike the right note and hopefully we can get a good discussion going.
Also, it’s unique because we’re going to continue the discussion by publishing it on The Glazine and throwing it out to a wider audience and getting a bit more feedback in the coming weeks and months. So, hopefully you’ll log into that because you might have to defend some of your comments against other comments made in the future.
On that note, it might be worth saying that we want a frank and fearless discussion here today. Obviously nothing will be put up on The Glazine before it’s debugged for libellous or defamatory statements, so feel free to let rip, as it were, verbally anyway. I hope we’ll have a good discussion and I’ll hand it back to Sam to kick off the first topic.
SAM KENNEDY: Thanks, Richard. The first topic is PVC and sustainability. Sustainability appears everywhere, not just in our industry. It’s one of these generic words; what does it actually mean? It’s interesting, I looked it up on the internet to get what they would call the exact explanation of sustainable development. It says, “Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. I think that encompasses the word itself. Giles, would you like to make some comments on that?
GILES WILLSON: Yes, sustainability is, I think, a bigger topic than just that definition, and I think one area which the industry doesn't talk about often with sustainability is profitability. That is one of the key aspects that is often forgotten because you have to be profitable to be a sustainable business. There are many elements of sustainability and I think profitability is one.
You also want to have a product which you manufacture and install - and it doesn’t matter what part of the industry you’re working in - if you’re manufacturing glass, windows, you want that product to be as good as possible to go into that house or other building, if it’s a new build or replacements. Therefore, you want to have a good lifetime and you want to make it as energy efficient as possible because windows do contribute to the energy efficiency of the building. New build, it’s the external envelope which is the energy efficiency and often windows and doors are forgotten and are now shown to be quite a vital aspect.
With the right products you actually have a thermal insulation layer. Additional products such as conservatories produce buffer zones, so it’s quite interesting that glass and our industry have a major contribution for the environment. We really have proven to both government and other parties that we have a major part to play. We just hope that they will support us a bit more in the future.
SAM KENNEDY: Does everybody agree with that or have any comments on that one? How does it affect your business? David, you were talking about some of this last night. How does it affect, shall we say, the sharp end of the business?
DAVID RUZICKA: I think in most industries today there are lots of buzz words put around, but certainly when people talk to me about sustainability it’s interesting that profit is in there and this is one of my arguments about our industry. For the majority of the people at the sharp end - certainly manufacturing-wise - there is no real profitability to create sustainability in the future for our industry. We’ve got people working for absolutely next to nothing, and if you look at some of the reports that are going out of the average profit that a manufacturer could look to make, you’re talking an average of 1.4% for an industry that’s turning over billions. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
The problem with sustainability is unless you’ve got the profitability, I don’t know how we’re going to sustain it. That’s my argument with it. Then everything else that comes along about getting into new build with it and where PVC’s going, I think a lot of this comes from right at the top. I think it comes from people like yourselves, extrusion companies and downwards from there. But as I say, my argument will come in a little bit later when we get into the nitty-gritty, so I’ll leave the rest of the comments for a little bit later if I can.
SAM KENNEDY: What about from the glass perspective, Tom? How does that affect you?
TOM RITCHIE: I think that we have made huge strides in getting the energy efficiency of buildings up to a level. I think if you look at our company sales across an international market and if you look at the standards that are given and held in Europe - even in Europe - you will find that the UK is actually at the bottom end of that. So, there’s certainly a lot of room to build.
Maybe the manufacturers of glass amongst us would confirm this. To some extent, this is technology-led in that in the old days before coatings on glass, you could only get to a certain level of U-value. Then the initial coatings, first generation, second generation, third generation coatings, and I’m not saying it’s limitless but there is a fair way to go.
Funnily enough, it comes back to the point these are technologies that cost a lot of money to develop, for manufacturers to invest in the plants to make millions and millions of pounds. Unless there is a profit return on that, people are not going to make these things just for fashion or fun.
So, the sustainability issue is one side, but, as I say, I think the standards that we have in the UK, we’ve moved from zero, let’s say, to level one and level two. Safety glass: I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember with horror that patio doors used to be in the early days 4 mm float glass and people were very happy. I can remember the breakthrough that came when the safety code was introduced as law and where that brought everybody up to a standard and now it’s absolutely common practice. The first houses that I bought in the mid-1970s were single-glazed; you just couldn’t do that now.
I think working, as I have, over many years with the GGF, the time it takes the trade associations to get government to up the standards, because as long as it’s a voluntary thing and as long as someone’s just selling a better item, there is always someone who will undercut that. To some extent the unit price of windows, many of you think it’s not high enough but it’s higher than it was because of the technology.
I think the developments in technology are one of the most interesting things that we can look forward to, and I think you’ve only got to look across to the insulation standards that are norms in Europe, where we might be going next. Certainly, one of the things that we may comment on this afternoon about EU legislation - and I think later this week the ministers are going to draw red lines - I can tell you once these European legislations begin to creep, we will find it very difficult to hold out for something individual against a standard that’s higher in Europe.
SAM KENNEDY: You mentioned the GGF then. Nigel, do you want to comment on the GGF’s line on this one?
NIGEL RICHMOND: The GGF has actually put together a Project Green which it started probably about a year ago now and we took that to the Labour Party conference literally only about three or four weeks ago. We had a pretty good reception from a representative number of MPs.
Sustainability goes right the way through. We’re always talking about the utilisation of valuable resources and keeping those resources available for future generations, but one of the big issues is the recycling of waste as well. The recycling of waste is an issue that’s just not being addressed, whether it’s land fill, whether it’s recycling PVC, timber or metal frames. The availability of waste recycling I think is an area that could make a significant improvement to the overall sustainability; because we can’t do everything, we’ve got to look at the whole chain.
Certainly, the GGF have put a lot of resources into it in conjunction with the BPF as well - we’ve not done this in isolation - and a lot of lobbying with government to get a sustainable industry as well. It comes back to the same thing: if we’re not making a profit in it, then nobody’s going to do it; they’re going to cut all the corners that they can. So there’s got to be a profitable industry to make that commitment to do it and to have their own sustainability as well. Sustainability covers everything.
SAM KENNEDY: From a BPF point of view, Martin, you’re putting a lot of pressure behind that.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Yes, there are different points that have been raised so far: Giles talking about sustainability being more than just an environmental consideration. We always talk about these three pillars: the social, the economic and the environmental. Dave was saying about the profitability and, “Where’s the money?” because without that nobody can carry on doing anything forever.
I think the point made about the government changing the law and the safety glazing aspect being brought up, there is an interesting perspective on that because obviously when the government changes the law and improves things by legislation we all squeal because it means we’ve got to do something different. That’s the other unfortunate thing. While we all sit round talking about, “Wouldn’t it be nice if this happened? Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened?” the actual fact is everybody likes the idea of change but nobody actually likes change when they’re presented with it as an imposition. I think people like to lead change rather than to be led to change.
When we’re all talking to government and the various forums that we sit on, and we have government representatives there that drop hints about 0.7 u-values for windows coming up in the future and 0.9 u-values being brought in in the next couple of years - which would mean that, guess what, we actually can’t carry on making what we’re making now, we have to make something completely different - I think we should encourage people to think that way but we should be cautious with time scales because things always take longer to do than we would like and they always cost more and they’re never quite as good as we expect them to be.
Focussing back on PVC and the PVC industry because that’s what we’re here to talk about, the issue of recyclability and material availability for recyclability is something that’s going to trundle on for ages. Because at the moment it is not self-sustaining; it actually doesn’t make anybody money.
The Vinyl 2010 initiative which puts money into recycling is very shortly going to start running out of steam. The funding that goes into Vinyl 2010 is going to start to reduce. The thing is a voluntary agreement and, unfortunately, when the funding has to start coming from us, I think with the pressure on, when we’re making 1.4% and you get an invoice come through that’s got voluntary on it, you can hear the buzz of the shredder already because it’s not going to get many signatures.
So, I think there is a responsibility here to understand that unless we really focus on finding where the recycler is, finding an economic way of re-processing it, finding new products to use it that don’t require a huge amount of separation, treatment and all of those sorts of things, then it’s going to be quite difficult for us to carry on shouting about our sustainable industry because it’s very quickly going to hit a few problems.
I think we’ve got to be conscious of this. Can we recycle PVC? Yes, of course we can. The old thing about PVC isn’t recyclable is completely wrong; it is very easy to recycle PVC but it’s very difficult to get at the recycler. That’s the problem, that’s the thing that we all need to be thinking of.
NIGEL RICHMOND: You mentioned the voluntary commitment to Vinyl 2010. There are a lot of voluntary commitments we’ve all made as an industry and we’ve all made them voluntary before they’ve been enforced on us by legislation.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Absolutely.
NIGEL RICHMOND: So, if you don’t meet Vinyl 2010 voluntarily, it will happen by legislation.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Absolutely agree. In one way, you’ve got to encourage legislation because it is the only way that people get pulled up and into line. Because if you have a voluntary commitment a certain proportion will do that voluntarily and it’s normally the people that actually had the idea in the first place because they like that idea of change. The people it’s being imposed upon or the people that don’t want to be in it for the long term and want to make more money will not voluntarily contribute. We just need to be conscious of that; that whatever voluntary initiative we take, we’re going to get some freeloaders on that.
SAM KENNEDY: Alan Burgess, you’re a great exponent of marketing and you really push the different levels of marketing in the window industry itself. I wondered if you see sustainability as a marketing tool. Can you get that over to the public?
ALAN BURGESS: I think it’s all about changing perceptions. I think the biggest challenge that we have - although there are a number of challenges the industry has and there’s a number of challenges that the BPF specifically has - is that I’m afraid on the doorsteps the sustainability argument just isn’t coming across. Perhaps it’s because it’s more elite properties in which they’re going into - sash windows - but if it’s not wood, it’s not possible. There are huge steps forward. The A-rated sash window, we never thought a year ago that would ever be achieved but, frankly, most people aren’t interested at the moment in the energy rating. If they are interested, they find it very difficult to believe the statement that it will save all of the heat that you currently lose through your window. Doesn’t matter whether it’s 0.8, 0.7 or whatever, an A-rated – you do not lose any heat, it is energy neutral. They just do not believe that that is at all possible. When it comes to sustainability, I’m afraid I’ve been in the industry 35 years and I remember going to the GLC as a young rep. We would be turned out on our ear if you spoke about anything other than virgin PVC. If you said there was a bit of re-grind, forget that.
Frankly, today if we could manufacture PVC windows just with re-grind, brilliant, but I don’t believe that the actual marketplace takes us seriously. The general public do not believe what we say. They are terribly sceptical and you’ve got to break that down, otherwise you aren’t going to go anywhere.
DAVID RUZICKA: Yes, but I think they’ve got a genuine reason to be sceptical, don’t you? One of the problems I have with our industry is going back many years ago, when people asked me what I did, I used to say, “I’m in plastics”. You really didn’t like saying that you were in double-glazing and unfortunately, there’s some very, very powerful people sat round this table today but most of our industry has grown up from ex-sales guys leaving retail organisations and setting up on their own and that’s half the reason that people don’t actually believe any more what we say because half the people that are saying it don’t understand it anyway. That’s the problem we’ve got with it.
SAM KENNEDY: Is that the link? You feel that we’re talking about it here but it’s not getting across to the consumer because of that linkage?
DAVID RUZICKA: Without a doubt. For me, I look at the quality of some of the people that we deal with. We turn over about £23 to £24 million, and you’re probably looking at, I don’t know, probably the top ten of our customers I can sit down with and have a proper structured conversation. They’ll have a business plan; they’ll know exactly where they’re going. The 90% don’t. They’re basically working for a wage at the end of the day. There’s no structure to their organisations, but we have to rely on those people. It’s all being generated - unfortunately, I come back to you guys at the top - by the systems companies. Unfortunately, what you’ve sown, you’re now reaping.
MICHAEL NAGLE: You’re talking about profitability and sustainability. Like you, I’ve been in the industry a long time, but one thing that I would say about this industry is that there’s been no time or commitment spent on training staff.
DAVID RUZICKA: Totally agree.
MICHAEL NAGLE: One of the things that I would say is the loss of knowledge from old guys like me that have learned this industry. You meet young guys in it nowadays, they haven’t got a clue. Not only that, but the ability to enter the industry has been the downfall. It was much easier to enter into the PVC or aluminium industry than it was the timber industry. The guys running timber shops, joinery shops, had to have a trade, had to have the knowledge. Okay, it’s gotten worse in the last 10 or 15 years because you’ve got these large supply-only frame operators and they’re encouraging it right down along the line. So I think that unless this industry suddenly starts thinking with its head instead of its feet, then that’s the only way it’s going to change and, not only that, it will add to the bottom line.
People don’t understand that just buying a frame, that’s it. You all know exactly what I’m talking about: you can set up tomorrow, you just need a frame, but there’s absolutely no in-depth knowledge with these guys and they’re competing with companies out on the street and the price is getting lower and lower and lower because the guy doesn’t have knowledge. He has no university degree, nothing, and that’s the problem.
JAMES HURST: May I just say something to support both of those things? Seven or eight years ago we realised that if we were going to sell any locks into the PVC industry, the locks had to be designed for someone who couldn’t install a door; to have so much flexibility that even an idiot would find that they simply couldn’t shut the door if it was really badly out of line and then, once they got it shut, there was enough adjustment, even if it was terribly twisted, to still be locked securely. Until we realised that we were losing business the whole time and that’s a terrible indictment.
MICHAEL NAGLE: It is; that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
JAMES HURST: Now we often find that it’s our technicians who are helping people to set up their own production lines. That, I think, just reinforces what you’ve both said.
SAM KENNEDY: I was going to ask Alan Trevethan as well because you’re in a slightly different niche market. We’re talking mainly trade and commercial but you’re on the new build side. You still have these problems, do you?
ALAN TREVETHAN: Yes. My view is if you look at the industry, the penetration of PVC into the new build market over the last 12 years going from something like 5% to 85%, that’s starting to reverse now.
The reason it grew, in my view, was that (a) the product worked for the builder; and (b) the product worked for the householder with the low maintenance issues. I think the problem is that now you’ve got things like eco home ratings coming in and you’ve got other products now saying that they have fewer problems with maintenance with pre-finished timber windows. If you add into this the sustainability argument, I don’t think as an industry the PVC industry has done enough to make sure that their product is seen as sustainable.
For instance, on housing associations where they get paid by the government to make their homes eco rated they’re taking timber on board because they can gain points. Not necessarily because they believe in the product or certainly not for the maintenance issues because they still see it as something they’re going to have to maintain, but simply because they can get more points for using a timber window.
Until we get that argument over and actually get the PVC product rated in terms of its sustainability, then I think we’ve got a problem.
NIGEL RICHMOND: That was done recently. The BPF did a massive exercise on that and there was a danger of PVC being rated far too low. Through a lot of people in the industry they got evidence of 40-year-old windows in Germany and 30-year-old windows in this country and did a tremendous amount of effort to get the BRE Green Guide and PVC was correctly rated, I think.
ALAN TREVETHAN: Can I just jump in there, though, because I think there’s a huge difference between us, as an industry, making sure that we can get a rating and then actually convincing the people that are making the decisions, or the householder, anyway.
NIGEL RICHMOND: But if you were still rated as C in the BRE, you are on the back foot right from the start.
ALAN TREVETHAN: No, I agree that we had to do it. I’m saying we now have to convince people that it is a sustainable product.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: The reason that we did the work was because obviously the Code for Sustainable Homes which is coming - which is the points system which I’ll say a bit more about in a minute - that uses BREEAM, which is a BRE methodology for coming up with the rating. So, the Code for Sustainable Homes, which is what people will refer to to make those decisions, relies on BREEAM; BREEAM relies on the Green Guide to Specification.
The Green Guide to Specification is where - as Nigel was saying - we’ve currently got a C rating. There’s an A, B, C category in there. Timber is A, GLP is A, believe it or not, and PVC is C. One of the methods that they use is a European standard life-cycle assessment system, and one of the key things in there is that they say a building has a lifespan of 60 years.
PVC had a lifespan of 25 years; therefore, you had to install 3 windows in the lifespan of the building. The work that we did now gives PVC a 35-year lifespan, which means you only have to install it twice, even though that’s probably not the case. One interesting point here is that soft wood timber windows still only have a 25-year lifespan, so you need one extra timber window to go in. Now, bear in mind previous LCAs have actually pitched PVC and timber in a very similar category. It’s within statistical error; they’re within 5% of each other. Now if you have to install one less timber window, common sense would tell you that PVC is going to look a bit better than it used to.
The frustrating thing with the revision for the Green Guide is that it should have been completed last year; we’re now told it’s not going to be completed until next year.
ALAN TREVETHAN: But that’s back to the perception thing.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: It’s back to the perception thing, yes. But there was a lot of work went into that. There was a huge amount of work for all different companies. Interestingly, Rehau put a lot of work into that particular project a little while ago, a couple of years ago, and actually didn’t get very far with BRE. He couldn’t convince them to change their lifespan assessment because it was only one company.
I think the BPF represents about 80% of the profile extruders now including Rehau. With that amalgamation of data, we were actually looking for a 40-year and got 35, but a 10 year increase is quite significant. We were quite pleased with that. Let’s just hope that it is significant enough, but hopefully that will change.
SAM KENNEDY: The second point on the agenda was can any one material be used in the future itself? As a group, we’re in PVC, we’re in timber, we’re in aluminium, etc, even steel. Is there one single material that can really take us through into the future?
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Well, no, there isn’t, but I said recently to a specifier, “If the Victorians had had PVC what do you think all those sash windows would be made of?” Because let’s face it, as an era they appeared to be real early adopters of everything, didn’t they? It was the industrial revolution. Every new thing was taken up with … We appear to be in a luddite era now where everybody harks back and wants everything to be like the past except, obviously, the amount of money they’ve got and the standard of living.
SAM KENNEDY: Kevin, again, you’re a company that looks at it differently. A lot of us have been in the industry a long time. You’ve come from a glass background into window manufacturing itself. What are your views on the sustainability side?
KEVIN HILL: I think it’s interesting listening to Dave’s point there about the customer base. We operate in the private RMI sector. We don’t get involved in new build or commercial work, and our customer base is unsophisticated to the extent that most people sitting around in their organisations would not understand or would not feel comfortable with this. So the whole issue of sustainability, window energy rating, agenda items that we’re comfortable with simply doesn’t have a resonance with that customer base.
I think equally as importantly when we talk about window energy ratings, Alan’s point was really interesting there about, “They don’t believe it”. At least you’re having the conversation; half of our customers, some of whom buy glazed product from us, don’t even want to have the discussion because they don’t see it having any resonance in their customer base, which is the home owner.
I think lobbying is a huge thing. I came from a couple of other industries in building products and a huge benefit to having a united, coherent, lobbying front with government, who only want to talk to one body at any one time, is without doubt worth its weight in gold. I think GGF, BPF, CPA - Construction Products Association - all have roles to play there but I don’t know how well those bodies come together to actually represent the window industry per se.
Training, I think, is another big deal. I look around the table here and with the exception of two companies - I think Rehau and Pilkington, forgive me if there are any omissions there - there are no PLCs, multi-national organisations involved in the UK window industry. They have a reputation for throwing money at training, education, training on the job, for having people go to external courses. Yes, we’re a private equity-backed business. Training doesn’t feature very heavily on our P&L, I’ll be the first to say that, and we’d like to think that we’re a reasonably professional organisation. It doesn’t have, again, a huge agenda in our organisation.
Coming back to reputation, I worked for Pilkington in the insulation side for awhile. Boy, the cavity wall insulation people had exactly the same problem, but you have a look at the share prices of businesses that are involved in insulation. Thanks to lobbying on a European level, insulation standards are now far higher than they ever were and the reputation of insulation being sold in direct sale and on the commercial side, it doesn’t have the same negative connotation, shall I say, that we feel we have here.
Now, I don’t know whether we’re all sat around here believing our own publicity. “What do you do?” “Well, I’m not a double-glazing salesman, I’m in engineered building products.” “Oh, really? How interesting. What are they, then?” “Double-glazing.” We almost get self-conscious about what we do. As Dave said, at last count it’s a £4 billion industry employing how many thousands of people?
Whatever happens to PVC in the next five years, people are still going to need windows. We’ve got to be at the vanguard of that and I think the purpose of this is to try and throw these things into the mix. I think it’s a fascinating period. I’ve been in it two years and even in those two years I’ve seem some significant changes and I think there’s more to come.
SAM KENNEDY: We’ll finish up with Nigel last because Nigel’s been into lobbying the government considerably with his GGF hat on. Is there a real presence from the government in pushing this through? I know we get a lot of sound bytes on it but are the government really interested in pushing this forward?
NIGEL RICHMOND: Well, we’ve had an awful lot of changes in government over the last three years, not just in ministers but also with the senior civil servants. Some people retired; we had some unfortunate deaths as well. So there’s been a tremendous change over probably the last three or four years but the message has been consistent from them. I don’t think it’s weakened. There’s now a new minister for this and we’ve had an all female cast for about a year or so and their resolve is strong. I don’t think it’s wavered at all. They will push it through. Martin, you threw away the old 0.7 and 0.9. Now, it was a discussion document but it was still there in a discussion document and they will push it through.
MARTIN ALTHORPE: Oh, it’s real. Yes, it is real.
NIGEL RICHMOND: The last change in building regulations we didn’t get any change. It will happen next time and I think this particular government, whoever the minister is, is very firm in their resolve on pushing legislation through. I’m sure they’d like to have it done in conjunction with a voluntary commitment and for us to make suggestions and discuss them and we will. I think they’re always out to consult and they will listen. I think we had the success - some people might not say success - over ventilation last year. That took an awful lot of discussion with government. Eventually, they listened and got there but that’s the first time I would say that they ever backed off a little; other than that, their resolve is very strong.
SAM KENNEDY: Just summing up this first session, would anybody else like to comment that I haven’t brought into the conversation?
