Making Green Come True Poster

Please register here as soon as possible! Only registered participants will receive the Zoom link.

Information in the conference pack is listed below, but if you prefer a PDF, you can find one here.

Who?

Are you wondering who you’ll meet at the conference? Check-out our See Who You’ll Meet pack! Here you’ll find photos and bios of our 18 speakers and breakout room leaders as well as a list of key organisations.

This event is primarily for residents, organisers and workers. Politicians and policymakers are warmly invited to listen and take part.

We will have a variety of people in the room, including: architects, energy efficiency experts, people who’ve experienced retrofit work, Tenants and Residents Associations, pensioners, housing and climate organisers, building safety experts, researchers, and trade unionists.

Programme

Schedule for making green come true

Panelists: Who will you hear from?

Stuart Hodkinson is a campaigning academic based at the University of Leeds whose research focuses on the devastating human costs from the privatisation and financialisation of housing. His most recent book is called Safe as Houses: Private Greed, Political Negligence, and Housing Policy After Grenfell (2019, Manchester University Press). He is currently working with residents groups to hold the UK government to account for its post-Grenfell regulatory response.

Ruth London is a founding member of Fuel Poverty Action in 2011, she now co-ordinates FPA’s work. A grandmother, she has been active for five decades organising against poverty, war, discrimination and climate change, in organisations including Women Against Rape, the Global Women’s Strike, Climate Camp, Reclaim the Power, and Occupy London.

Tony O’Brien is a retired carpenter-joiner, and long-time union organiser who has been active in the TUC since 1963. Tony helped spearhead the great national building workers’ strike in Mile End in 1972, he was founding secretary of the Construction Safety Campaign in 1988, and he recently published a book on housing and building direct labour organisations.

Tracey Rogers is a social housing tenant living on the Pembroke Park development in Ruislip. Tracey and her family, like many residents at Pembroke Park, have suffered from very poor insulation in their properties and incorrectly installed piping for the sub standard DH System which has regular outages during the winter.

Pauline Saunders is a founder member of CIVALLI. In 2019, Pauline was shortlisted for Inside Housing’s Women in Housing Awards for Woman of the Year. She works tirelessly to staff a helpline for those struggling to gain redress following failed or inappropriately installed cavity wall insulation.

Check out our See Who You’ll Meet pack to learn more about breakout room leaders and other contributors.

Breakout rooms: What’s on offer?

Listening to residents: the fight for housing that’s fit for all

This breakout room will focus on the role of Tenants and Residents organisations in fighting for insulation and warmth and in holding social/private landlords accountable, how they are under attack, and what hope there is for increased accountability. It will also look at the fight for homes fit for the people who live in them, whether we’re old, young, or children, and whatever our disabilities, family sizes, and needs.

Fire safety: Salford tenants’ battles, and the new Building Safety Bill

Residents of Pendleton Together, in Salford, live in 9 high rise blocks that are the mirror image of Grenfell Tower, and have only just had their cladding removed. Now it’s cold. Tenants will report on their ongoing battles to get homes fit to live in. Plus: In response to the pressure following Grenfell, the government is creating a new regulatory system governing high-rise building and fire safety. They’ve promised that residents’ voices and safety will be at the heart of it. How can we hold them to it?

UK homes are ‘heating the streets’: how can we keep warm instead?

This breakout room will focus on insulation types and ventilation: what standards are we aiming for and what materials are safe, functional, non-toxic, sustainable, and can be available at scale? Passivhaus, enerphit, or natural ventilation; rockwool or hemp: or should we instead be focusing on renewable-energy heating? A chance to engage with these ongoing debates.

Too slow, too fast? The pace of retrofits, training workers, and winning good, green jobs

The current pace of retrofitting homes falls miles short of any realistic climate target. But when projects move too quickly with contractors seeking profit at the expense of workers’ and residents’ safety and health, the results are disastrous. How do we ensure that a secure, well-trained, well paid, secure, caring workforce can carry out the transformation that our quality of life – and the future – depend on?

No sustainability without justice, from the point of extraction on up

Plastic-based insulation means continued extraction of fossil fuels, a process also leading to wars, repression, impoverishment, and destruction of environments round the world, and locking us further into climate change. Yet if our homes continue to heat the streets, they’ll require more energy. And if it comes from renewable sources, this requires mining of rare earth metals, now carried out at the expense of peoples across the globe. How can our movements align to press for an alternative – not unabated climate change, nor profit driven supply chains that devastate the global South?

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