Home Energy Efficiency: North of England

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on securing this important debate. The energy efficiency of homes is incredibly important as we face the challenges of climate change, cutting emissions and the cost of living crisis, with sharp increases in energy costs that will be devastating for many of my constituents. It goes without saying, but we all know that the north is colder than the rest of the country, so I am not surprised that he chose to focus on that part of the country for the debate.

I am very concerned about what this winter will bring for those people on low incomes. Many Members have spoken about fuel costs and so forth. The hardship, grinding poverty and health implications should not be underestimated. One of the things that we can do, therefore, is to improve the energy efficiency in existing homes as a matter of urgency.

Citizens Advice has been in Parliament today, and it highlighted the issue. It has talked about how effectively insulated homes will help to reduce soaring energy bills by making heating our homes easier and cheaper by ensuring that heat is retained better. As my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) mentioned, however, the UK has the least energy-efficient housing in Europe.

The Government must match the ambition shown by Labour to insulate 90 million homes within a decade. That move would save households an average of £400 a year on their energy bills. I am keen to hear the Minister commit to that. In the Liverpool city region, metro Mayor Steve Rotheram, has invested nearly £60 million to retrofit more than 5,500 homes. Funding is being targeted at the most disadvantaged households, making their homes more energy-efficient and cutting their fuel bills. Many of the more than 700,000 homes across the region could be retrofitted, if the Government were to come forward with more funding. Will the Government provide additional funding to local areas such as the Liverpool city region so that more homes can be retrofitted?

Will the Minister also tell us what he can do to ensure that we see an increase in the number of apprenticeships in the building skills we need for both retrofitting old homes and building new eco-friendly homes, so that young men and women can acquire the skills we need for our housing stock, secure well-paid and skilled employment, and contribute to their communities in an incredibly practical way?

Finally, I want to say a few words about new build. My constituent Colin, who is an architect, has designed a series of ultra low energy net zero carbon homes. The homes follow the same principles of the award-winning Passivhaus that Colin designed for himself and his wife Jenny in 2013. I have visited the house on a number of occasions and it is incredibly impressive. The house is based on the Passivhaus energy design standard developed in Germany and is designed to provide a high level of comfort, while using very little energy for heating and cooling. Colin and Jenny’s home features triple glazing, LED lighting and an air source heat pump. It costs less than £70 for a year’s supply of energy for heating, lighting, hot water and cooking. It is inspirational and I think we are all quite shocked to hear that figure, but it shows that it can be done and, with political will, the Government could make that happen at scale.

The issues we are debating today are incredibly urgent. I hope that the Minister will come forward with a clear commitment and set out how the Government intend to step up to this challenge.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change (Greg Hands)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on securing this important debate. As ever, it is excellent to have so much good representation in the north of England from our party.

This Government’s unwavering commitment to decarbonise the country’s 30 million buildings has the welfare of those who most need energy-efficient homes at its very core. Getting to net zero is not just a legal commitment; it is the right policy for this and future generations. Improving the wellbeing and living conditions of northern communities is a key part of the levelling up of all our towns, cities and regions as we build a green Britain that works for every part of the country.

Underpinning all our work in that area is the heat and buildings strategy, a copy of which I have brought to this debate, published at the end of October 2021. It explores different options for low-carbon heating, from hydrogen trials to heat networks and increased use of heat pumps, to meet the challenges of each region of our country, recognising that there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

At the same time, we are taking a fabric-first approach to retrofit, ensuring that emissions are reduced first, regardless of how buildings are heated. That will be supported through a commitment to invest £6.6 billion during this Parliament, which is funding technology trials and capital schemes such as the home upgrade grant and the boiler upgrade scheme. In the past year alone, we have committed more than £1.3 billion to domestic retrofitting schemes, which was one of the central points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington and, indeed, other Members.

We have prioritised the worst performing low-income homes to receive measures such as external wall insulation and clean heating systems. That has already lifted thousands of households out of fuel poverty, and future phases of home decarbonisation will upgrade over half a million more. Families who would not be able to afford energy efficiency improvements for themselves will be able to face future winters knowing that they will be warm, sometimes for the first time.

Our local authority delivery scheme and home upgrade grant empower local authorities, which know their communities and housing stock best, to decarbonise local homes according to specific needs. In the north, around £226 million of funding has been allocated to local areas through the latest phases of those schemes. As many Members have said, the north of England has benefited disproportionately from the energy company obligation. Since that scheme started under this Government in 2013, over 13% of homes in the north-west and over 12% of homes in the north-east have received energy efficiency measures. Indeed, 12.2% of households in Darlington have had their homes improved under the energy company obligation, compared with an average of 9% across Great Britain.

My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington, who is vice-chair of two relevant APPGs and knows the engineering heritage of his town so well, made an excellent speech. In researching it, he sat down with local housing providers such as North Star Housing, which quoted some striking sums regarding the costs of retrofitting a home relative to the value of that home. My hon. Friend made some thoughtful arguments about how we should evaluate the cost efficiency of those different measures. He also pointed out that 64% of properties in Darlington are rated below brackets A to C on energy efficiency, which shows that despite the progress we have made on energy efficiency—particularly over the past decade—there is still much work to do. That is why we are investing £6.6 billion over the course of this Parliament.

We had an intervention from the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who is not in her place anymore, to say two things. She attacked the Government’s record on renewables, nuclear and energy efficiency. I found it startling, considering that when the last Labour Government started their period in office, they said that when it came to nuclear, they saw no economic case for new nuclear power stations in this country. That was at the start of their 13 years in office.

On renewables, we have taken the amount of energy generated from renewable sources since 2010 from 7% of the energy mix to 56%. That is an incredible increase in our renewable output as part of our energy mix.

[Margaret Greenwood]

The Minister is right that my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) is not in her place, but would he not agree, or concede, that it was a Conservative Government that pulled the funding for solar on people’s roofs, stymying an industry and making it much more expensive for people to install solar? Precious years have been lost, and we could have had many more solar panels on our roofs.

[Greg Hands]

I fundamentally disagree. Solar has done incredibly well in this country. We have a big capacity in solar—I think around 14 GW. Our ambition is to grow that to 70 GW. Part of that is thanks to the VAT reduction that we saw this year. I do not remember the hon. Lady supporting that VAT reduction on solar panels. The Government are taking active measures to increase and support solar energy.

On energy efficiency, when we took office in 2010, just 14% of properties in England were rated “energy efficient”. That has risen to 46%, which in 12 years is an incredible increase. However, that shows that 54% of our properties are still not sufficiently energy efficient, so we still have work to do, but we can only do it by making investment. The last Labour Government said there was no money left. Perhaps if they spent a little more on energy efficiency in those 13 years, we would not have been in a position where only 10% of homes were rated A to C when we took power.

My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington asked when the new energy company obligation scheme will begin. I think the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), also raised that same point. A three-month interim delivery phase was introduced between 1 April to 30 June 2022 under the previous scheme rules to enable delivery to continue subject to some measure limitations. Obligated suppliers may choose to deliver under the new scheme rules backdated to April 2022, when the underpinning legislation was put in place. We are pleased to announce that we laid the draft Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2022 before Parliament on 22 June. We expect the regulations to be made and come into force in July.

My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington also asked about energy advice. Our simple energy advice service, launched in 2018 in response to the Government-commissioned “Each Home Counts” review, provides homeowners with impartial and tailored advice on how to cut their energy bills and make their homes greener. The service has been accessed by over a million users.