Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme

David Johnston Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson.

The debate is an important one, because when we talk about climate change, we tend to focus a lot more on transport than we do on buildings, and yet buildings are our second biggest cause of emissions. Domestic buildings are 30% of our energy use and 19% of our emissions overall.

Ultimately, I would like to see more of what I have in my constituency, from Greencore Construction, which has built homes that are net zero in both build and use. It sold them to housing associations at the same price they would pay for other houses. It has continued to innovate and, with recent modifications, reduced the carbon emissions by a further 40%. Those are now carbon-positive homes. I have taken the Secretary of State for BEIS and others to see them, because what the company is doing is really impressive. In July, it will be talking at my pre-COP summit for Wantage and Didcot constituents.

More broadly, I welcome the commitment on the future homes standard to reduce the amount of emissions by 75% to 80%. That is very positive but, again, that is about new homes and we know we have an issue with the homes that have already been built.

I was excited by the green homes grant scheme. I was excited by the ambition to make homes more energy-efficient. I was also excited by the jobs that I hoped it would stimulate in the supply chain. I was very disappointed when it was cancelled due, at least in part, to lack of take-up, although there were clearly other issues with it.

We have a heat and building strategy coming. We will have to see what is in that—I hope it will tackle some of the issues we are discussing—but as of today, I would support another scheme. I will quickly offer some observations on things that I have seen as a constituency MP which we would need to retain or change if we were to have a new scheme.

First, I thought it was really important that we gave more financial support to low-income households. That is the fairness aspect that shines through in the Climate Assembly report. We do not want policy decisions and judgments to be made by the most affluent in society; we should not judge everything that those on low incomes are doing without giving them the support to make changes that they may well want to but just do not have the means to make.

Secondly, price hikes very definitely took place once the scheme had been announced. Constituents wrote to me to say, “I know what that should cost because I looked at the price last week, and suddenly it has gone up.” I am not sure that there is a lot the Government can do about that—they had price guidelines for applications to the scheme. I suspect this kind of thing always happens, but I think it would be positive if we did whatever we could to avoid price hikes.

Thirdly, there was debate about the kitemark. I defended the use of the kitemark for the tradesmen, because it is important that we do not have cowboy tradesmen—for want of a better term—doing shoddy work. I know there is a debate about whether TrustMark was the right one for this. Maybe it was not, but I think it is important to have that kitemark.

Fourthly, there is a broader issue—not just for this scheme but for our strategy as a whole—relating to historic listed buildings. I have four towns in my constituency, but 64 villages. The homes that are built in Didcot are of varying quality, but they are new, whereas the homes in the villages are often protected in various ways and face a whole bucket of issues. Many of the people in those villages are keen to make their own contributions to combating climate change, but there is a range of things that we have not yet got to grips with, from the fact that some of those homes can use only oil for their heating because they are off the gas grid, to whether they are allowed to have solar panels. There is also lime rendering, which was something about which I did not know very much, but which certain types of home need as part of the insulation process. That can only be done at certain times of the year, and there are not many tradesmen who can do it.

Those things feed into the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne): if we are going to have another scheme, it needs to be over a long enough time period that we can get those things right. We need to make sure that prices are not hiked too much, that we are using the right kitemark, and that tradesmen see it as in their interests to get that kitemark because of the length of time that it will cover. We also need the scheme to cover enough seasons that those things that can be done only at certain times of the year can be included. We might even train more people who have experience with older, historic buildings, because that issue left rural areas at a considerable disadvantage in the short timeframe the scheme was to designed to cover.

We will probably still spend a lot more time talking about the cars we drive and the plane journeys we take, but unless we can make the progress we need to make on buildings, we will continue to hamstring our ability to tackle our net zero goals.