It would take 323 years to bring the energy efficiency of the UK’s housing stock up to scratch if the work was carried out at the same pace as the recently scrapped Green Homes Grant programme, an MP has calculated.
Labour MP Fleur Anderson, speaking in a House of Commons debate last Thursday on the botched scheme, said that only 15,500 homes were improved during the six-month programme but that 10 million owner-occupied homes require retrofitting to bring them up to the EPC (energy performance certificate) C standard by 2035.
She said: “At that rate it will take us 323 years to deliver the change we need. In a climate emergency, we simply do not have that time.”
The Putney MP spoke after Phillip Dunne, chair of the Commons environment audit committee, had outlined the scale of the “colossal” task required to improve the energy efficiency of the UK’s housing stock.
Adding private rented homes, the Conservative MP said around 13.6 million homes must be upgraded to at least EPC C standard by 2035.
If the government were to bring this target forward to 2030, as it suggested in its response to his committee’s recently published report on domestic energy efficiency, he said this would mean upgrading the equivalent of 1.5 million properties a year or 125,000 properties per month between now and the end of the decade.
Putting these figures into the context of the 15,500 upgrades delivered during the GHG, Dunne said: “That is a fraction of what would be required every month from now until the end of the period.”
He said any replacement for the GHG should be “long-term”, “preferably for ten years, and funded in the pan-government spending review due to take place later this year.
Dunne added that any replacement should be as “free of bureaucracy as possible” and easier to understand than the GHG, which had been “far too complicated” and put many people off.
Shadow energy minister Alan Whitehead said the GHG was “doomed not to work from the start” after the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) was forced to rapidly develop the scheme following the Treasury’s decision to identify £2 billion for energy efficiency improvements as part of its economic response to the pandemic.
He said: “This scheme was not just a pathetic failure; it has put the cause of retrofitting homes back substantially. Companies that wanted to do the work were burned yet again and will perhaps be reluctant to undertake further work. Disappointed householders were grievously misled on the energy uprating process, and precious time has been lost for getting to grips with this.”