On 29 March 2021 the UK government announced that its own Green Homes Grant scheme, launched in September 2020 as a £2 billion initiative to help tackle refurbishments and refits in Britain’s energy- inefficient older housing stock, would be scrapped on 31 March 2021, and some £300 million would be transferred to local authorities to carry out their own schemes.
On some estimates, as much as 20% of the UK’s CO2 is emitted by houses. It has been generally accepted that this has to be tackled as a priority if the UK is to meet its net zero targets. Some 19 million homes need extra insulation and retrofitting of older gas boilers. The Green Homes Grant would have offered up to £5,000 (£10,000 in exceptional cases) in vouchers for projects to improve energy efficiency and towards the cost of installing, for example heat pumps or solar panels in place of gas and fossil fuel heating and boilers.
However the scheme showed early signs of the strain of its own complexity. Householders reported being unable to access qualified installers, or to be able to make sense of the complex paperwork to obtain the scheme’s vouchers. Some contractors overcharged, but many others were badly hurt by the way the scheme was administered, with complex paperwork and late payments. Many declined to participate, while those that did and invested sometimes thousands of pounds in retraining staff to be suitably qualified to take part now find that investment wasted, which will only make it harder for them to have any confidence in joining future schemes.
The scheme attracted critical scrutiny from the Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons, whose Chair Philip Dunne MP commented that –
“A much better understanding of cost, pace, scale and feasibility of skills development is desperately needed for net zero Britain.”
The Committee reported on 22 March 2021 –
“Net zero impossible unless urgent action taken on energy efficiency this decade.”
Chris Stark, CEO of the Committee on Climate Change remarked that –
“The tragedy is not so much that the scheme is cancelled, but that it wasn’t planned well in the first place… perhaps local delivery should have been the model all along?”
Colm Britchfield of the Institute for Government has argued that this scheme should not have been seen as a short term stimulus measure but as a long term policy for decarbonising the housing stock. Building the supply chain for greener homes is not a short term objective, as can be seen by the shortage of qualified installers –
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/treasury-should-not-axe-green-homes-grant
The fate of the Green Homes Grant is another reminder that delivery of Paris Agreement targets and the conclusions of whatever agreement is reached at COP26 will be key. The UK government needs credible plans for the next decade to address some of the intractable, awkward issues affecting the UK’s emissions, including its older housing stock, the prevalence of fossil fuel boilers, and the affordability of retrofits and replacements.