Oral Answers to Questions

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

If rural communities are to benefit from the clean energy transition, it is important that they play a role in hoping to host the infrastructure. When the Great British Energy Bill went through Parliament, there was much discussion about ensuring that communities that host the new infrastructure do not lose out. I can send the hon. Gentleman details of exactly how his community can engage with that process.

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

10. What steps he is taking to improve the energy efficiency of homes.

[The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Ed Miliband)]

In 2025-26 alone, we will upgrade up to 300,000 homes through the warm homes plan and other measures. That is more than double the number of homes upgraded last year. Later this year, we will set out more details of a warm homes plan to upgrade up to 5 million homes, and there will be more details in the spending review tomorrow.

[Lisa Smart]

Happy birthday, Mr Speaker. My Lib Dem predecessor, the much-missed Andrew Stunell, pushed for the zero carbon homes programme during his time in the 2010 to 2015 Government, having brought in his first Bill on that subject back in 2004. Sadly, those standards were scrapped as soon as the Conservatives were governing on their own. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has estimated that, had those standards been reached in 2016, households would have paid £5 billion less in energy bills as a result of living in better insulated and more energy-efficient homes. The Secretary of State earlier mentioned the future homes standard, which is bringing in welcome steps on solar panels and so on. When will the Government go further to reach zero carbon homes standards with a fabric-first approach?

[Ed Miliband]

The hon. Lady raises an important question. The failure to have a zero carbon homes standard or future homes standard in place has meant that we have built over 1 million homes since then that are now going to have to be retrofitted. That makes no financial sense. It is right to put those upgrades in as standard from the get-go, and we have done a lot of work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and house builders to make sure that can be done in a way that also means we can build lots of homes.