Carbon Neutral Houses Exempt from Stamp Duty - or are they? |
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| Thursday, 11 December 2008 13:09 | |
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The Government declaration that Zero Carbon-rated houses were to be exempt from Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) was at first a psychological shot in the arm to us over this project, but a close study of the strict definition of Zero Carbon and how we might clear this hurdle ended in disappointment. The actual ‘Holy Grail’ of Zero Carbon is difficult to achieve at the best of times, as it requires a building to have a net production of carbon into the atmosphere of zero. Although our houses are almost uniquely efficient for this sort of development, we would have needed a wind-turbine to achieve the last bit of balancing electrical generation, which could not have been efficiently done on this site because of the sheltered valley location. I looked into it with the help of John Peapell Sustainable Solutions, our specialist consultant, and was prepared to pay for a turbine on an existing site elsewhere and then pass the ownership of this to the residents’ management company. It seemed to me to be just about economically feasible in that the savings in SDLT could be spent on this, and the house owners would continue to benefit into the future from income from the turbine and green offset credits, etc. , and we were really quite pleased with this piece of ‘joined up thinking’. Sadly, examination of the detail of the legislation showed it stipulated that the generation had to be ‘hard-wired’ to the development, not just owned by it, so that idea took less far less time to sink than it did to develop. I did rather feel that the goalposts were not where one might expect them to be on this one; hardly any houses will achieve this at the moment without huge arrays of photo-voltaic panels or on-site wind turbines (which of course restricts their locations to windier (less energy efficient!) sites. So it is quite safe for the Treasury to offer it. |
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