Heat and Building Strategy

Lord Best Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Best]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Lord Callanan on 2 July (HL Deb, col 802), when they plan to publish the heat and building strategy.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

This is a key policy of the Government. We will publish a heat and building strategy in early 2021 that will set out the immediate actions we will take for reducing emissions from buildings, including deploying energy-efficient measures and transitioning to low-carbon heating. This ambitious programme of work will enable the mass transition to low-carbon heat and set us on a path to meet our net-zero 2050 emissions targets.

[Lord Best (CB) [V]]

I thank the Minister for her reply —it is good to hear that the heating and building strategy is on its way. Since this directly affects every household in the country, it certainly deserves priority in the follow-through to the PM’s 10-point plan. Bearing in mind that heating by gas has to end, but its alternatives —clean electricity and hydrogen—are at least twice as expensive, will the strategy ensure that decarbonising our heating does not lead to a massive increase in fuel poverty?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely correct in the points that he makes. A number of options have the potential to play an important role in decarbonising heat and we are exploring many of them simultaneously. Improving the energy efficiency of people’s homes is the best long- term solution to tackling fuel poverty. The Government have already introduced a statutory fuel poverty target to get as many fuel-poor homes to a minimum energy-efficiency rating. Furthermore, the energy company obligation scheme is focused entirely on low-income and vulnerable households.