These words have been taken from the 2019 Report:
UK housing: Fit for the future? by UK’s Committee on Climate Change, available here

The word ‘Malta’ or ‘Maltese’ has been substituted throughout in place of ‘UK’ - but the places are interchangeable, the words and meaning are not.

Executive Summary:

Maltese homes are not fit for the future. Greenhouse gas emission reductions from Maltese housing have stalled, and efforts to adapt the housing stock for higher temperatures, flooding and water scarcity are falling far behind the increase in risk from the changing climate.

The quality, design and use of homes across Malta must be improved now to address the challenges of climate change. Doing so will also improve health, wellbeing and comfort, including for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and those living with chronic illnesses.

This report identifies five priorities for government action:

1. Performance and compliance.

The way new homes are built and existing homes retrofitted often falls short of design standards. This is unacceptable. In the long run, consumers pay a heavy price for poor-quality build and retrofit.

Greater levels of inspection and stricter enforcement of building standards are required, alongside stiffer penalties for non-compliance. The 'as-built' performance of homes, for example how thermally efficient they are, must also be better monitored. Closing the energy use performance gap in new homes (the difference between how they are designed and how they actually perform) could save between €70 and €260 in energy bills per household per year.

2. Skills gap.

The chopping and changing of Government policy has inhibited skills development in housing design, construction and in the installation of new measures. Key steps for the Malta in reducing emissions, like the wider deployment of heat pumps, require new skills. The Government should use initiatives to tackle this low-carbon skills gap. New support to train designers, builders and installers is needed for low-carbon heating, energy and water efficiency, ventilation and thermal comfort, and property-level flood resilience.

3. Retrofitting existing homes.

Homes across Malta must be made low-carbon, low-energy and resilient to a changing climate. This should be infrastructure priority and should be supported as such by Treasury. Homes should use low-carbon sources of heating such as heat pumps and heat networks. The uptake of energy efficiency measures such as loft and wall insulation must be increased. At the same time, upgrades or repairs to homes should include increasing the uptake of: passive cooling measures (shading and ventilation); measures to reduce indoor moisture; improved air quality and water efficiency; and, in homes at risk of flooding, the installation of property-level flood protection.

4. Building new homes.

New homes must be built to be low-carbon, energy and water efficient and climate resilient. The costs of building to a specification that achieves the aims set out in this report are not prohibitive, and getting design right from the outset is vastly cheaper than forcing retrofit later.

From 2025 at the latest, no new homes should be connected to the gas grid. They should instead be heated through low carbon sources, have ultra-high levels of energy efficiency alongside appropriate ventilation and, where possible, be timber-framed. A statutory requirement for reducing overheating risks in new builds is needed, alongside more ambitious water efficiency standards, property-level flood protection in flood risk areas, and increasing requirements for greenspace and sustainable transport in planning and guidance.

5. Finance and funding.

There are urgent funding needs which must be addressed now: low-carbon heating, and resources for local authorities, in particular building control. The Government must implement a Green Finance Taskforce recommendations around green mortgages, green loans and fiscal incentives to help finance upfront costs, as well as improving consumer access to data and advice. It should widen the scope of these measures to include resilience.