The government is not on track to meet its warm homes targets

 


By David Lennan, Chairman, National Warm Homes Council

The Energy Saving Trust and leading home and decarbonisation organisations wrote to the energy minister last week to highlight the key areas that must be addressed in the government’s Warm Homes Plan (WHP), which is expected to be unveiled in the summer.

For the WHP to achieve success, the Trust is calling for a boost to public awareness on the net-zero transition, better access to funding and finance to overcome the upfront costs to making home-efficiency improvements, and greater support for the retrofit supply chain.

The WHP is being launched at a time when millions of families are still reeling from rising energy prices and fuel poverty. The Plan commits to investing £13.2bn to lower bills and emissions while making homes warmer and improving energy security. As part of this investment, the government plans to upgrade five million homes over this parliament.

However, the government is moving too slowly to meet its warm homes commitments and is currently on track to miss its target for insulating homes.

Two-thirds of homes, or 19 million, need better insulation, according to government data. The Committee for Climate Change says 14.3 million homes will need retrofitting to achieve the UK’s 2035 EPC C target. A report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and Nottingham Trent University reveals every home will need to be retrofitted at a rate of around 1.5 homes every minute to meet current net-zero targets.

With potentially only four years remaining in this parliament upon the WHP's release, the five million homes target will be difficult to meet, given that just 250,000 homes were upgraded in 2023. The UK has only ever upgraded five million homes in five years, back in 2008-12, when a different policy landscape existed and where insulation was fitted, mainly at no/little cost to the occupier. 

Boosting home insulation is vital to achieving the government’s energy ambitions. However, simply spending more on insulating homes will not help the WHP deliver success over the long term. There should be a greater focus on protecting insulation to reduce wastage in government spending and the amount of work that needs to be redone on improving existing homes. 

One of the consequences of the government’s home upgrade scheme from 2008 to 2012 was that the millions of homes that were insulated then, now need doing again, since 80 per cent of people use their loft for storage, thereby at least halving the thermal properties of the insulation.

Not protecting insulation is a false economy, as once compressed, the insulation is irreparably damaged. Homeowners will have to replace it, and until they do, they will not get the energy and carbon savings they expect.

Considering only 1% of UK lofts currently protect their loft insulation, the government needs to mandate insulation protection as a priority in its WHP to ensure the insulation is guarded against compression and degradation for many years to come – saving homeowners and the government a great deal of money. 

The government could act now by updating the Future Homes Standard to require insulation protection as standard in all new homes, which would prevent them from having to be expensively retrofitted. 

Improving the energy efficiency of the UK’s housing stock is on the critical path to net zero. We need to be far more ambitious in both the range of measures we install in homes and the speed we roll out those measures.

Meeting net zero requires every person in the UK to take some form of action and change their behaviour. All homeowners need to be encouraged to improve their homes.

The government has a duty to help. Through its WHP, it could encourage millions of homeowners to upgrade their properties and boost rates of loft insulation, thereby permanently reducing energy bills and emissions. 

But it also has a duty to be sound with public finances. By providing homeowners access to more scalable and affordable technologies widely available today, such as loft insulation protection, the government can get closer to its targets without wasting large sums of money.  

www.nwhc.org.uk

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