Retrofitting Buildings: National Strategy

Lord Duncan of Springbank Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I cannot answer that specific point but, if the noble Lord had been present yesterday at the University of Birmingham’s presentation on this, he would understand that a lot of what it discussed was in exactly this area. It went on to say that more power should be devolved to local authorities to bring forward the retrofitting of buildings. But companies like Vaillant and Cadent are doing an awful lot of research into retrofitting and adapting to the future possibility of using hydrogen in the heating system, which will also help to decarbonise it.

[Lord Duncan of Springbank (Con)]

My Lords, I will pick up on a point from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone. It is estimated that only one in six manage to secure tradesmen qualified to install under the green grant scheme, which is an extraordinarily low figure. How do we know that it will improve? What measures are the Government bringing in to improve it, and how will we measure that?