The launch of the Ofgem online portal for the government’s home heating upgrade scheme was delayed because the contractor appointed to do the job couldn’t find sufficient skilled staff, one of the regulator’s directors has admitted.
The delay in launching an portal has been identified as one of the reasons for a slower than expected take up of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which subsidises the replacement of gas boilers with lower carbon alternatives, since its launch in May this year.
The full website only went live at the end of last month.
At the latest hearing of the House of Lords environment and climate change committee’s ongoing inquiry into the scheme, energy minister Lord Callanan revealed that at the midway point of the scheme’s first year last month, £40.1 million worth of vouchers had been issued out of a total budget of £150 million.
Philippa Pickford, director, delivery and schemes at Ofgem, said the decision to outsource the design of the poral to a third party organisation hadn’t been “as successful as we wanted it to be”.
She said that “largely” due to the “very competitive job market for digital skills”, it had taken Ofgem’s contractor longer than “we would have liked” to build up the team and retain staff.
Pickford said it was clear early in the process that Ofgem would be unable to launch the scheme with a fully digital portal. Instead, the regulator opted for a combined manual product for installers and digital portal for property owners.
She admitted it was “disappointing” for users that the digital portal had not been available and that Ofgem had brought the design in-house by creating a new portfolio for digital delivery headed up by a new deputy director.
Since then, Pickford said digital delivery been “much smoother” and the online portal launched in November had received “good feedback” from installers
She also said that about three quarters of installers certified to fit heat pump had registered with the scheme so far.
Responding to concerns expressed by the committee’s chair Baroness Parminter that the scheme would have to spend more than twice as fast for the rest of the year in order to use up its budget, Lord Callanan said the government will explore whether any underspends could carried over into 2023/4 but admitted that Whitehall capital expenditure rules may make this difficult.
The minister also said that he hoped the government’s ‘market based mechanism’ to ensure that a proportion of home heat systems sold are heat pumps, would be up and running “late next year”.
Lord Callanan also said that it is envisaged that terraced house neighbourhoods will be heated in the future with ground source heat pumps feeding off under-street arrays, while heat networks will be more suitable for blocks of flats.
And pressed on whether the government would change planning regulations to make it easier to install heat pumps, he dismissed concerns that they are too noisy.
“I’ve seen many heat pumps in operation but can’t hear them: the idea that they are providing noise nuisance to the wider community is very wide of the mark.”