Knowledge, Ignorance and Power: What About the Mould?
After fifty years studying moisture, defects and decay, Colin King has watched Britain repeat the same mistakes. He warned government that insulation without understanding would breed a national mould crisis. He was right.
Britain has a mould problem. Not the fashionable kind that grows on soft cheeses or in labs, but the slow, black, suffocating bloom that creeps across the walls of homes from Sunderland to Swansea. It stains ceilings, peels wallpaper and fills children’s lungs. For decades, it has also stained government policy, an unspoken consequence of good intentions applied badly.
When the Refurb & Retrofit editorial team sat down to discuss how to report the current wave of mould-related failures in public and private housing, one name surfaced immediately.
For people in the know, Colin King has long been the country’s quiet conscience on moisture, damp and building performance. A chartered surveyor turned building scientist, he spent twenty years at the Building Research Establishment (BRE), advising ministers and drafting standards that have shaped how Britain builds, insulates and repairs its homes.
He also helped to found the UK Centre for Moisture in Buildings, chaired multiple British Standards committees, and still advises government on mould risk.
King’s career spans almost every national retrofit scheme. He's been around long enough to remember the first energy-efficiency drives of the 1990s to the latest, scandal-hit ECO4 programme.
Through all of them, he has watched the same pattern repeat: ambition, funding, rollout, failure. The problem, he says, isn’t a lack of knowledge.
“At times the knowledge which was in the public domain has been overlooked, ignored, not implemented,” he told me. “Probably for a number of reasons. But the primary one comes down to the cost of doing it.”
The performance gap nobody measured
King’s most famous contribution came through a £2.5-million government research commission that began life as a simple question: why aren’t we getting the carbon savings we expected from insulation? The project ran for three years, analysing thousands of homes. His package of work was bluntly titled Unintended Consequences.
“We were putting on insulation,” he recalled, “but not getting the carbon savings we thought we were. So my work was to look at how the work was procured, how the buildings were surveyed, how the work was undertaken—and then to monitor how the buildings performed afterwards.”
The result was a forensic map of Britain’s retrofit blind spots: thermal bridges left uninsulated; ventilation ignored; junctions around windows, roofs and pipework left to sweat.
“There was no design,” King said. “Nobody was effectively addressing that. Insulating the flat bits was easy- it’s what happens at the edges, the geometrical junctions, that really matter.”
In one sentence that has since echoed around the sector, he described the culture of the time: “Basically, you marked your own homework.”
The BRE findings were supposed to close that gap. Instead, they became a footnote in a larger story about deregulation, outsourcing and the quiet corrosion of Britain’s technical memory.
Knowledge lost in translation
Before the Eco schemes, King reminds me, Britain already had solid guidance. BR262 (the BRE’s moisture-control handbook) had been around since the 1990s. “It’s referred to in Part C of the Building Regulations,” he explained. “But there was lobbying by industry that if people followed BR262, a lot of properties would never be insulated. So industry wanted another process and that’s when third-party testing came in.”
Certificates replaced understanding. Products were approved in isolation from context. A system could claim to prevent thermal bridging, he said, “but that doesn’t mean it will.”
For King, this was the start of a deeper rot: the substitution of paperwork for physics. “There’s no measurement of performance,” he said. “Nobody checks that it works. It relies on people complaining. It was all part of the agenda within government to deregulate regulations and go for self-certification.”
The result, he argued, was predictable. Damp and mould rose, energy savings fell, and a generation of policymakers convinced themselves that the failure lay with homeowners rather than the systems themselves.
The forgotten factor: people
King’s work also exposed a more human oversight. For years, building performance had been treated as a technical problem. Occupant behaviour was a variable too messy to model, so it was ignored.
“Almost non-existent,” he said when I asked how much attention was paid to how people actually lived in the buildings being upgraded. “The focus was purely on energy savings and carbon reduction, not the interaction between making a house more efficient and how that affects indoor air quality.”
Until about 2015, retrofit guidance simply said make it no worse. If a property’s ventilation was poor before the work and just as poor afterwards, the installer was compliant. “It was ludicrous,” he said.
Today, the health consequences of that logic are visible in hospital statistics and coroner’s reports. “There’s always been a basic understanding,” King said, “but not of the significance of getting it wrong.”
The information gap
If knowledge exists, why is it still so hard to apply? King’s answer is damning. “All the information needed to make the work better is there,” he said, “but it’s locked behind paywalls.”
He means this literally. The British Standards Institution, once a publicly funded guardian of open technical guidance, now sells most of its documents. “If somebody working in retrofit had to access all the relevant standards,” King explained, “it would cost them over fifteen thousand pounds.”
Fifteen thousand pounds for access to knowledge largely produced with public money. “The whole problem,” he said, “is that it’s written by experts for experts. Then they lock it behind a £300 or £400 paywall, which nobody will pay.”
PAS 2035, the supposed bible of domestic retrofit, was briefly charged at £150 until widespread outrage forced its release as a free download. Even so, the surrounding technical documents remain inaccessible to the small contractors who actually do the work.
“It’s an access-to-information gap,” King said. “And that means the people on the ground are flying blind.”
Regulatory capture and the price of permission
The longer we talked, the clearer it became that King sees Britain’s mould crisis as a symptom of something larger: the privatisation of trust itself.
In theory, public standards should serve the public. In practice, they have become revenue streams. “BRE was privatised in 1997,” King reminded me, “the last day of Maggie Thatcher’s power. If she’d gone a week earlier, it would never have happened.”
Once the government’s own research arm, BRE now operates as a private consultancy, competing with the same manufacturers it once tested. “What we’ve got now,” King said, “are commercial, industry and professional bodies never really pulling in the same direction.”
The result is regulatory capture by stealth. If a manufacturer can afford the testing, its product enters the market. If not, it waits years for approval, or gives up. Meanwhile, innovators without legacy influence face brick walls.
King is careful not to name names, but the frustration is clear. “Everybody who comes up with a new product,” he said, “be it ventilation, insulation or heating systems, hits the same problem. Introducing innovation has always been a problem. Government gets nervous because over the years it’s been badly burnt. So it’s naturally conservative.”
He paused, then added: “Of course there’s a bit of vested interest. That’s market forces trying to protect their market. It’s like the misinformation the petrochemical industry comes out with about renewable energy.”
Archetypes, ignorance and the illusion of sameness
For all the acronyms and paywalls, King insists the roots of the problem are simple. Britain still pretends all buildings are the same. “When industry looks at a building, they assume they all perform the same,” he said. “There was no differential between system-built houses, solid Victorian terraces or modern timber frames. They were all surveyed and assessed in exactly the same way. You can’t do that.”
His point is both technical and moral. To treat buildings as uniform is to treat people as uniform too. It erases context climate, materials, income, even culture. The consequences are measured not just in kilowatt-hours but in health, debt and despair.
Refurb and Retrofit Magazine
The report Colin King contributed to a decade before the ECO 4 Scandal - This Report Didn't Get Put Behind a Paywall, This Time
King recalls spending years trying to get officials to see what surveyors in the field already knew: that a no-fines concrete house in Newport behaves nothing like a sandstone terrace in Bath. The failure to distinguish between them, he argues, is “where the friction point really is, between policy ambitions and the reality of homes people actually live in.”
The myth of innovation
Retrofit’s defenders often counter criticism with a single word: innovation. If the next product arrives faster - smarter coatings, thinner boards, better algorithms - the problem will disappear. King is unconvinced.
“The infrared industry have been arguing for twenty years that nobody will support their heating system,” he said. “They paid for studies at the Energy House to show it works. Ceramic heaters have been used in Germany for decades, but here they’re not seen as mainstream.”
He recalls similar battles in the past: “In the 1970s, the timber-frame industry was in uproar because brick manufacturers blocked them. Double-glazed windows, plastic windows, same story. They were all seen as dangerous innovations until suddenly they weren’t.”
Britain’s retrofit system, he believes, still rewards incumbency over invention. Appendix Q (the gateway for new technologies into government-funded schemes) is notoriously slow and opaque. “What we need,” he said, “is a process where innovation can be tested in situ under PAS 2035, without having to go down that route.”
Data dreams and AI realities
Our conversation turned to artificial intelligence. In the past year, multiple startups have claimed they can predict damp and mould through AI models fed by sensor data. King has already been approached by several.
“With the right training, yes, I think it could help,” he said carefully. “But the biggest problem is how do you train AI with the kind of knowledge you accumulate over forty years looking at buildings?”
He distinguishes between the measurable and the meaningful. LiDAR can map geometry; sensors can capture humidity and temperature; but mould is not linear. “It’s a completely fluid occurrence,” he said. “It’s linked to temperature, humidity, and the condition of the building, as well as the moisture load inside. That can vary every single day. Relative humidity goes up and down. Wind direction changes. The health of the occupants changes.”
Still, he sees potential. “If you could crack it,” he said, “it would probably be quicker than somebody trying to figure out what needs to happen.”
He brightens when describing the idea of “damp and mould dashboards” for homes, readouts that warn occupants before risk becomes damage. “Did you know that two or three of your rooms are now at risk of damp or mould?” he imagines a display asking. “Now you can do that with sensors if you understand psychrometrics.”
The price of prevention
Even with better data, he cautions, the problem may not be technical at all. “You can predict it,” he said, “but then what do you do to stop it? What happens if the reason you’ve got damp and mould is because you can’t afford to heat your property? That’s not a technical problem. It’s a societal problem.”
Here, King’s tone softens. Decades in the field have given him a weary respect for the people living inside the spreadsheets. “You could take exactly the same property,” he said, “and put a different number of people in it, or a different demographic, and it would perform in a completely different way.”
Mould, in his telling, becomes a mirror held up to British society: a symptom of inequality, neglect and denial. “We’ve got to stop preaching that all buildings are the same,” he said. “They’re not.”
A life’s work, and a warning
Past retirement age, Colin King still answers his phone to local authorities, housing associations and journalists. He still sits on committees, writes standards, and lectures about moisture physics. Yet he remains, in his own words, “unpaid for most of it.”
Many in the industry see him as a contrarian. He sees himself as a realist. “People think I’m anti-insulation,” he told me. “I’m not. I’m just anti the way it’s done at the moment.”
That distinction, between the goal and the method, may be the most important of his career. For King, insulation is not the villain. Ignorance is. So is the architecture of power that rewards short-term performance over long-term understanding.
When I asked whether he felt sidelined by younger voices promising faster, 'economical' fixes, he didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” he said. “There are younger, more enthusiastic people out there convincing government they can do ten times as much at half the price. And all they see is the older generation trying to put stumbling blocks in the way. We’re not. We just want people to do it better.”
He paused for a moment, then smiled at the irony. “If we did things once and did them right, we wouldn’t have to do them again.”
The mould and the message
In the end, the story of Colin King isn’t about damp walls. It’s about how a country forgets what it already knows. Britain’s housing stock, its standards bodies and its regulators have each drifted toward amnesia, each believing that progress means reinvention, each quietly erasing the last warning.
King’s career is a ledger of that forgetting. He has written the codes, watched them diluted, written them again, and watched them privatized. Through it all, the mould has spread, the science wasn't missing, the will to listen was.
He remains remarkably patient. “All the information needed to make the work better is there,” he repeats. “But it’s locked behind paywalls.”
Perhaps that is Britain’s true damp problem: not the condensation on our walls, but the condensation of knowledge - trapped, unventilated, waiting to breathe again.