The environmental collective Last renovation warns about the situation of these dwellings called “thermal sieves”, very poorly insulated and therefore very energy-consuming. According to one of its activists, Sasha Cantet, the government is moving much too slowly to renovate them. “At the current rate of renovation, it will take us 1,900 years to renovate the entire French housing stock”, she says. This is an argument taken up by La France Insoumise.
In this sentence, there is true and false. What is false is this duration of 1,900 years. To arrive at this result, the association made a somewhat simplistic calculation. She took the number of thermal colanders in France, 4.8 million (we now know that they are actually 5.2 million). And she divided it by 2,500, the number of home renovations per year. We therefore effectively end up with a duration of 1,900 years. But it is not that simple !
This figure of 2,500 renovations, which comes from a report by the Court of Auditors last March, in fact concerns only part of the renovations that are carried out each year in France: the most important. Often it is necessary to temporarily rehouse the inhabitants, until this is done. To do this work, the households benefited from what is called the “thermal colander exit bonus”, this sum of money provided for by the “My renovation bonus” system.
But part of the renovations were carried out outside this system, and were therefore not counted by the Court of Auditors. This is the case when it was just a matter of putting double glazing on the windows, for example, insulating your attic or changing your boiler.
However, we cannot say that France is moving fast enough on the issue. This is where the association Last renovation speaks true. France’s objective is that in 2050, all of its housing should be classified A or B in terms of energy performance. Today, there are only 5% according to a study by the National Observatory for Energy Renovation last July. Moreover, at the end of October, the Court of Auditors strongly criticized the government’s action on this subject and Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne responded by promising a change of gear.