“What a load of resources!”

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London speaks about the technologies and techniques that London will need to employ if it is to stay out of hot water

With the politician’s knack of presenting a grave threat as a golden opportunity, Boris Johnson tells his audience at Ecobuild 2009: “This economic downturn we’re enduring is a spur and incentive to progress. A lot of people are having a really tough time; a lot of them are losing their jobs, they’ve got serious problems with cost overheads: this is exactly the moment for them to be installing technologies that will allow them to save money.”

The Mayor arriving at Ecobuild. His administration plans to use
finance generated through the Underground
to fund renewable energy projects

A Mayoral obsession
Retrofitting – installing existing buildings with technologies that reduce the need for power, lighting, ventilation, heating and air conditioning – is the Mayor’s favourite topic-du-jour. “Some people say retrofitting is not the sexiest or most interesting subject but I am becoming obsessed with it. I think there is a massive pent-up demand for this – people want it, they understand it.”

At the moment, about 20,000 homes in London are being retrofitted. “We need to push that up dramatically,” he says. “There are three million homes in London – we should be doing at least 100,000 homes a year. We could be doing far better and I’m going to urge that we coordinate the two dozen schemes that are currently in existence and use them to drive forward retrofitting in London.”

There is an opportunity here to create jobs too, he says. “I don’t think it’s too rhapsodic to have a vision of a world in which Londoners can expect to have a knock on the door and there will be some enthusiastic bounding person dressed in dungarees, full of optimism and hope and technological know-how, who will show them how their home could be retrofitted and how they could save a huge sum of money – and that person will be part of a growing number of people who will be given jobs by the drive towards retrofitting our properties.”

A new institute is going ahead to train people in this skill. “A retrofitting academy is going to be set up by the LDA [London Development Agency] – rather in the way that TfL [Transport for London] is setting up an engineering academy to cope with the huge technical demands that London faces with CrossRail and upgrading the underground. Peter Rogers of the LDA will be heading this up.”

The drive to increase the efficiency of buildings is as much an environmental as an economic concern. “It’s right for the city, it’s right for this particular juncture in the economy and it has the additional merit of being right for the planet as well. We will do our bit to save the world – assuming of course that body hasn’t been saved by Gordon Brown,” he jokes.

The death of waste
Boris Johnson is looking forward to the day when “waste” becomes a politically incorrect term. “If you drive along the M40, between junctions one and two, you come to a great horrible zone where all the leaking escapes from this pit full of nappies from London. It’s really quite dismaying,” he says.

And just as upsetting as the smell is the squandered potential of this material. “This stuff isn’t waste – it could be used as fuel for the generation of electricity and heat. I won’t be happy until the whole concept of ‘waste’ has been rebaptised as ‘resources’. I won’t be happy until Arsenal football fans are chanting “what a load of resources!”

Brooding over city lights
A top priority of the Greater London Authority, the organisation over which Boris Johnson presides, is hitting its target of reducing London’s CO2 emissions by 60 per cent by 2025 – no mean feat. “I’d be deluding myself if I said it was going to be easy,” he says. “In spite of the recession the indicators are still moving in the wrong direction."

He draws a characteristically droll vignette of his ruminations on this subject. “Many nights you will find me sitting alone in my eyrie in City Hall brooding on ways of reducing London’s CO2 output, looking out at the lights of Canary Wharf and of the City of London, which are still on late at night despite the difficulties in the financial sector, when suddenly, without any warning at all, the lights go off in my own office and I am plunged into darkness. In order to be able to read again I have to wave my arms around – if I want to write in my office I have to type with extreme gesticulation.”

This is, of course, because City Hall is equipped with motion sensors to save electricity. This and other systems are being introduced in GLA buildings across London. Work began in March 2009 on 42 buildings, including TfL and fire services buildings. “By making sensible changes to the way they are heated, we are saving GBP 1 million a year just from those 42 buildings. In Ilford fire station alone 125,000 kW of gas, 55,000 kW of electricity and 50 tons of CO2 will be saved per year as a result of the changes we are making in the form of CHP [combined heat and power], changes in lighting, ventilation and more efficient chillers and boilers.”

On top of the CO2 generated by commercial properties, which account for 31 per cent of emissions, 38 per cent of all CO2 emanates from domestic properties. New building methods aim to reduce housing’s carbon footprint. The Mayor commends London’s Bourbon Lane scheme of 78 affordable homes for families and so-called key workers. “Each building is going to have either a ground level garden or a roof garden, a balcony, is going to be clad in sustainable timber, with CHP providing electricity and hot water. We are going to ensure, insofar as we can, that all future developments have those kinds of attractions.” One of the former magazine editor’s first moves as Mayor of London was to stop the publication of the mayoral newsletter. “We have scrapped The Londoner and thereby saved an unconscionable waste of trees and used the money we saved to invest in planting trees across London, the first 1,500 of which are already going into the ground.”

Even with all these initiatives, the UK is in serious danger of being in trouble with the EU over its carbon emissions. “It’s going to be very difficult for us to avoid EU infraction procedures,” the Mayor admits. “It certainly makes no sense in my view to proceed with the third runway at Heathrow if you want to avoid that procedure, simply because you not only increase your CO2 emissions: you also greatly increase congestion and vehicular emissions in west London.”

Cycling superhighways
The famous cycling enthusiast is delighted to announce: “By next May we will be launching a wonderful bike hire scheme for London, complete with cycling superhighways which will allow people to travel safely from the outer boroughs of London into the centre of town.”

He reiterates his opposition to London’s bendy buses, championed by former Mayor Ken Livingstone, which are a problem for cyclists. “We are in the process of using a new, cleaner, greener, quieter bus for London and phasing out the extremely environmentally hostile bendy buses.”

Boris Johnson invites his Environment Director Isabel Dedring to chip in: “One of the things we are looking at is how could the London Underground, as a very stable user of electricity, be somehow used to help finance some of the large-scale renewable projects in the UK or elsewhere. It’s not beyond the wit of man to imagine that one could somehow structure a deal where we could use our purchasing, and that helps to securitise other projects.”

A transformation in private transport in the capital is also high on the agenda. The Mayor says: “We will use our public procurement power to drive forward the electrification of the motor vehicle fleet in London. There is huge opportunity here. The motor manufacturing industry is, I think, teetering on the verge of a leap forward in the direction of using electric vehicles. We should be using our regulatory power, our leadership, the tools available to us to drive that forward. I think that will be much for the benefit of the quality of life in London – and again the generation of jobs and growth in a difficult economic time.”

If the Mayor makes the most of his powers and implements these aims, it will be for the good of the city as well as the planet. “If we make investments in all these technologies – in CHP, in retrofitting, in electric vehicles, totalling £17bn we will not only drive jobs and growth now, we will also make London cleaner, greener, more attractive and of course ever cooler as a place to live and to come and invest.” This article is based on the Mayor’s presentation and Q&A session at Ecobuild in Earl’s Court, London in March 2009. To read his exclusive interview with Host City turn to “In My View”