Warm Homes Plan: Homeowners and tradespeople hold the key to decarbonising our homes

The Government’s Warm Homes Plan represents a genuinely exciting opportunity to decarbonise our housing stock at scale, writes Tom Hoines, Energy Services Director.

The £15 billion package to upgrade up to five million homes by 2030, reduce energy bills and lift a million families out of fuel poverty represents a major step towards net zero carbon emissions by 2030. The plan:

• Brings welcome certainty about both government strategy and funding over the next few years. Uncertainty and stop-start funding initiatives have been hugely damaging to business and household confidence over past decades. A clear strategy will be implemented by a new Warm Homes Agency, which will work with Combined Authorities and other partners to scale up partnerships and provide impartial advice to consumers, backed up by a more robust system of consumer protection. An expanded Boiler Upgrade Scheme, funded by £2.7 billion to 2030, and plans for consumer loans, seek to make support universal when combined with the £5 billion for low-income schemes.
• Invests in growth. Measures to expand the UK heat pump manufacturing supply chain and unlock investment are welcome, as is the focus on creating good quality jobs, up to 240,000 by 2030. To support projected demand for installations we need a three-fold increase in trained heat pump installers by 2030, although this will rest on tradespeople seeing the real demand from households increase locally. While there is welcome focus on removing bureaucracy for households in the plan, we need to remove barriers to skilled trades careers too.
• Puts a renewed focus on understanding households’ motivations, barriers and the support they will need to take practical action. To scale up green home upgrades, the plan rightly argues that we need to “radically simplify” the consumer journey. Currently, this journey is too confusing, complex and variable depending on where you live. Reed in Partnership understands how this can be improved through the service it provides to Suffolk residents on behalf of Warm Homes Suffolk. Almost 500 homeowners have already used it to book a free or low-cost energy efficiency assessment to evaluate how they use, heat, ventilate and insulate their homes, with some going on to install solar panels or make other cost-saving improvements.

With talk of a ban on gas boilers now quietly dropped, the scheme does mean that consumer choices are now front and centre of whether the UK is able to deliver its clean energy and wider net zero targets.

More than ever, success will rest on two things. The first is convincing more households to consider low carbon home energy and making it easier and cheaper for them to do so – an area where the plan holds great promise.

However, the second is enabling the small businesses that make up the vast majority of the assessors, suppliers and installers of low carbon heating to have the confidence to invest and grow into fitting clean energy technologies and recruit and retrain the people needed to support this. Much comes down to supporting small firms to take on apprentices, especially in essential trades such as fully-qualified electricians, as our recent evidence to Parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee argued. There is no shortage of young people who want to do trades apprenticeships, but small businesses need more help with managing the risks of taking on inexperienced people without support. If the new Warm Homes Workforce Taskforce set up by Government can really tackle this barrier, it can open the gates both to great clean energy careers for young people and the development of the skilled workforce we need to electrify our homes.

You can read the full Warm Homes Plan here: Warm Homes Plan

Hear from some of the customers who have had an energy assessment done through the energy assessment voucher scheme we deliver for Warm Homes Suffolk: Suffolk Energy Efficiency Assessment on Vimeo