Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) Regulations 2022

Lord Carrington Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lords, so much detail, so much complexity. I thank the Minister for his introduction to these historic regulations. They presage building operations in pretty well every conventional house in Britain. Perhaps there will have been nothing like it since the immediate post-World War II years, when we addressed the consequences of Göring’s Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s rocketry on our homes and factories.

I served in three Administrations as a young man, and I recognise the nature of these regulations. They are the product of a dedicated department and a concerned Government, and they could have been presented by any concerned previous Government of yesteryear, but now is a unique challenge. The vocabulary and phrasing is reassuring in its familiarity, with the prosaic title and then the vocabulary which we know well: standards, eligibility, budgets, grant values, investigation, offsetting, a code, vouchers and regulation. It is the whole panoply of the reassuring, everyday Civil Service vocabulary that, in fact, describes a quite revolutionary proposition, and one so soon to impinge on the private, ordered, domestic life of pretty well everyone. It is startling that, almost in successive years, our fellow citizens have willingly signed up to lockdown—a kind of partial, self-imposed house arrest—and now to inviting plumbers, heating engineers and inspectors into virtually every one of their traditional houses.

Like many others in your Lordships’ House, I am fully signed up to green, and one cannot argue with the statistics: they are very daunting. Understandably, the Government must do their duty here and take the nation with them, whatever the difficulties. The regulations will go forward. The nation—the planet—faces mighty consequences if the Government do not present regulations such as these. However, in the context of this debate, one can ask: are they appropriate as they stand? I found the regulations’ executive summary and Explanatory Memorandum helpful amid the plethora of challenging small print, but summations raise further questions. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee report, the 32nd of 2019-21, has drawn special attention to these regulations: namely, that they are politically and legally important. Are the Government confident that there will be customer protection adequate to prevent mis-selling? What plans and what detail have the Government prepared to protect the unsuspecting household consumer? Are the regulations overambitious in their targeting?

The scrutiny committee raises doubts aplenty. Is not the 10-point plan flawed? None of this has been done before, and it is a massive challenge to government and every citizen, whose home will be invaded, necessarily, by the regulations. To install 600,000 heat pumps per year is hugely ambitious. This is a project totally new to government, to the trade and, most importantly, to the citizen. Our people are already under huge pressure from inflation and are soon to be impacted by colossal increases in their heating bills. Is not 600,000 heat pumps a year in six years overambitious?

The committee raised the question: where shall the tradesmen, the crafts women and men, the jobbing builder, electrician and plumber come from? There are no such assurances in the regulations. Is it not the case that we already find it hard to gain the prompt services of trades men and women? At paragraph 36, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, in heavy type, draws special attention to this challenge. Reading between the lines, the committee is not at all assured by what the Government plan.

These regulations nowhere refer to the hugely inconvenient domestic consequences for the millions of families who will endure great inconvenience—literally dust, noise and disturbances of every kind. They do not consider the certain, unwelcome impact on the poor, the elderly, the sick and the disabled—indeed, the ordinary and the house-proud. There are to be costs for the citizen so inconvenienced. Surely, since the regulations bear down on virtually every householder, they should have been presented by the Government to the Chamber of the House itself. These issues require full and lengthy examination. Why have they not been taken on the Floor? Perhaps the Minister will respond. The House is not questioning the Minister; this Committee is—and it is rather a naked Committee, if I may say so.

In another place, where I was for 31 years, one’s duties frequently took the elected Member to the older decaying council estates, now referred to as social housing. Successive Governments granted welcome moneys for their modernisation. Often, tenants remained in their homes while all around them work men and women hacked and altered. They lived amid noise, dirt and dust, and their possessions were locked away in distant containers. It was unpleasant, to say the least. The fear is that many tens of thousands receiving heat pumps shall endure the same. What shall the Government do to ameliorate these inevitable problems?

Lastly, the Government are fortunate to have the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, to present these challenging regulations. After all, he negotiated the pitfalls of the Brexit legislation with considerable aplomb. He would have been a marvellous member of the “Test Match Special” team of quite some years ago, alongside Messrs Johnston, Trueman, Bailey and the “Alderman”. The latter described clever defence against good bowling as “nurdling away”. The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, nurdles away so matter-of-factly and skilfully when he takes to the Dispatch Box to present these detailed, complicated regulations.

[Lord Carrington (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his clear explanation of how the scheme will work. However, like the noble Lord, Lord Jones, I await the Minister’s response to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s specific comments relating to how the scheme will work in making progress towards the Government’s ambitious target of 600,000 installations by 2028 and on how realistic the Government’s current projections and targets are, given the six-year timetable.

I also want to know from the Minister why there is a seven-week delay in the introduction of the scheme. This causes severe problems for both manufacturers and installers who have geared up for the scheme’s introduction on 1 April. Will the RHI scheme be extended to cover this gap? Can the Minister also confirm that this scheme will run its full course, unlike the green homes grant, and tell us what will happen if the take-up goes beyond 30,000 installations per year? Is funding contemplated for that?

I am also interested in the Minister’s response to the part that other measures and technologies can play in achieving the same ends. Can he provide confirmation that they will receive similar financial support and incentives? Although the financial support that the boiler upgrade scheme will provide is welcome and necessary, it is important to recognise that heat pumps and biomass boilers are just two of a range of technologies that will help us to reach net zero. We need to take into account the diverse nature of the United Kingdom’s stock of domestic and non-domestic properties. This requires us to be flexible in the choices we make regarding the low-carbon solutions that are employed.

For instance, heat pumps are not appropriate or effective in a vast number of properties. Given this, the Government should adopt a technology-neutral approach to the decarbonisation of home heating, ensuring that the most appropriate and suitable solutions are used on a case-by-case basis. BEIS’s figures indicate that, in the off-grid space, roughly 1.7 million homes use fuel oil for heating, while another 220,000 use LPG. For many of these properties, which are often older, uninsulated and listed and where insulating is either unfeasible or extremely challenging, installing a retrofitted heat pump could cost £30,000 or more. Even with the maximum amount of government support, home owners in these instances would be left with a bill for £24,000 or more.

One interesting option for such properties is renewable liquefied gas, a fuel source with almost zero carbon emissions that is made from a range of sustainable feedstocks including food waste. Renewable liquefied gas can effectively utilise existing infrastructure to deliver affordable decarbonisation solutions for both domestic and non-domestic properties. Keeping costs down for the consumer is particularly important in ensuring an equitable transition. Giving too much weight to any one technology, such as heat pumps, risks leaving people behind on the journey to a greener future. I urge the Government to remain open-minded and give due consideration to those homes that are the hardest to decarbonise, where a one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, discussions on heat pumps are always interesting. Everyone seems to have a view, although few have any experience of actually running the things; I find that this is particularly the case with those who are the most enthusiastic about them. I would love to know how many noble Lords who have spoken today have installed a heat pump—indeed, whether the Minister or any other member of the Government has done so. For the record, I have; I have two heat pumps, in fact, so I do speak a little from experience.

I welcome the scheme even if, from a personal point of view, I regret that it has come a bit late for me —although I do benefit from the RHI scheme, which over its life is slightly more generous. We need to bring down the costs of heat pumps if we are to encourage their uptake. This scheme is simple and up front, so I think it is likely to be more successful than the RHI scheme, which is complex and, frankly, rather tedious with having to measure everything and send in the forms every three months.

I want to raise a couple of points of caution, based both on my own experience with heat pumps and on publicly available information, including an Answer from the Minister to a Written Question I submitted to him about a year ago. Heat pumps are often stated as being able to generate heat equivalent to three to four times the electrical energy that is put in; I have seen claims of up to five times. There has been quite a lot of press coverage over the weekend suggesting that, with these grants and based on that kind of efficiency claim, heat pumps could now be cheaper than gas. There is plenty of coverage saying it; it is not right, but it says it. Advertising in brochures for heat pumps often talks about those sorts of efficiency multiples. My own pumps claim they should achieve 3.2 times efficiency; they are less efficient high-temperature pumps, which is why it is a slightly lower number.