My Lords, I would like to speak to my Amendment 117 in this group— I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings heath, for supporting this amendment with me. I should declare my interest, as I co-chair the All-Party Parliamentary Carbon Monoxide Group and I chair the CO Research Trust.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, faulty appliances are often a source of carbon monoxide, but so are wood-burning stoves and oil central heating. Anything that burns a carbon-based fuel can produce carbon monoxide, which is colourless, tasteless and odourless and results from incomplete combustion of the fuel. The problem is that high levels kill you rapidly, within a few minutes, but the symptoms are that you just feel warm and sleepy. You think that you are comfortable and sleepy; the next thing you are dead. However, low levels also produce long-term damage and are thought to damage the developing foetus in pregnant women.
4.30 pm
Rather alarmingly, a recent National Energy Action report showed the dangers of indoor spaces where people live and work. It looked at households in the low-income bracket, with a range of vulnerabilities, and found that 35% of the properties it looked at had prolonged spikes of a carbon monoxide level over the threshold at which it can have possible health effects. Some 22% had spikes that lasted longer than 15 minutes, which could be fatal. Households with the maximum carbon monoxide levels were linked to those reporting stress and anxiety about energy affordability, which reaches statistical significance in correlation. There seems to be a relationship between underheating and poverty, then using appliances, sometimes even a gas oven, as a source of heating. That is linked to elevated levels of carbon monoxide.
Older homes have older and riskier types of boilers. When people face fuel poverty, servicing appliances is one of the first things to go. As we try to decrease energy consumption in new buildings, we make them more airtight. The indoor air quality deteriorates, because it is trapped. This was brought into even sharper focus during Covid, when it was well documented that there was a higher incidence of death from Covid in places with poor ventilation.
It is well established that a higher incidence of exposure to carbon monoxide and other indoor pollutants occurs during the winter, when people spend more time indoors. According to the Office for National Statistics, one in eight households in Britain has no access to a private or shared garden. That rises to one in five households in London. During the winter, these people are indoors with their children, often burning gas or other fuel that risks carbon monoxide production.
A study from Queen Mary University concluded that deaths from Covid were 70% higher in areas of increased air pollution. That has been linked to nitrous oxide and sulphur dioxide. A similar study has not been done sampling the quality of indoor air during Covid, although people have now become aware of raised carbon dioxide levels because, if there is more exhaled air, there is a greater chance of more coronavirus in that air. Hence we have suddenly become aware of the need to open windows and so on.
Much innovation and policy-making in the built environment has focused on new buildings and expensive technologies that have low environmental impact, but there are two problems with this approach. Energy efficiency has grown and buildings have become tighter, but construction techniques designed to seal a house and prevent heat escape also decrease ventilation. That is positive from an environmental perspective, because we use less fuel to heat the home, but the down- side is poor indoor air quality.
A second major issue with the approach is that it does not account for the older buildings in which most people live and work. The UK has the oldest building and housing stock in Europe, which is largely due to the legacy of dwellings and buildings built around the Industrial Revolution, which still form the backbone of our urban areas today.
People need to know that the air where they live, or spend their day working, is safe. The cost of a carbon monoxide alarm ranges upwards from about £14, with a battery life of seven years, so it costs £2 a year for a carbon monoxide alarm to keep people safe. The cost is minimal, or negligible, but the cost associated with a life lost to carbon monoxide poisoning can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds when one looks at the problems for bereaved children in particular, when they have ongoing needs over the years ahead. On the economic argument alone, I suggest to the Government that a simple amendment requiring carbon monoxide alarms to be installed by whoever owns and runs the building would be more than cost effective.