Retrofitting Buildings: National Strategy

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I could not agree more with the thrust of the noble Baroness’s question. The heat and buildings strategy is designed to provide a long-term framework for these initiatives. We are investing £2.5 billion in a national skills fund to support the immediate economic recovery and the skills needed to deliver on our net-zero targets, and we invested £6.9 million alongside the green homes grant voucher scheme to deliver over 8,000 training opportunities. We are continuing to work with businesses and key industry bodies and have launched the Green Jobs Taskforce to produce an action plan for just this sort of initiative.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, there are said to be some 23 million existing homes with gas boilers, although some people believe that the figure could be very much larger. How long will it take to tackle the conversion of all those to heat pumps or hydrogen? What is it going to cost? Is this really the best way of contributing, as we must, to tackling rising global emissions?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My noble friend will be aware of the boiler upgrade grant scheme, which was just launched in May. That will provide capital grants to support the installation of low-carbon heat technologies away from fossil-fuel heating. As for how long it will take to replace all those heat boilers, it will take time because, as my noble friend says, the task is enormous—but we are investing £6.6 billion over the course of this Parliament to improve energy efficiency and decarbonise heating.