Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

It is pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) for securing this important debate. I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

In the summer of 2020, I joined Members from across the House, along with trade unions, industry leaders and environmental groups, in welcoming the announcement of the green homes grants scheme. It represented a welcome opportunity to support the construction industry at a time of immense economic hardship, to slash energy costs and tackle the scourge of fuel poverty, and to create thousands of high-quality jobs in left-behind communities such as my constituency of Birkenhead.

Less than a year later, however, the scheme has been consigned to the scrapheap and businesses have been left to pay the price. Ministerial infighting and bureaucratic incompetence has doomed to abject failure what was supposed to be a shovel-ready project. Of the £1.5 billion originally allotted, around £1.4 billion has gone unspent, and a measly £300 million has been reallocated to the local authority delivery scheme. Instead of creating the 100,000 jobs that were promised, the TUC estimates that the scrappage of the green homes grant will cost 13,000 jobs across the north west, in a shameful betrayal of the very work of small businesses that the scheme was supposed to support.

We should not be surprised. The scrapping of the scheme is just the latest in a long line of Government failures to live up to promises on climate change—failures that have left the UK widely off course to meet both our fourth and fifth carbon budgets. If we are serious about tackling climate breakdown, we need urgent action to reduce household emissions. However, this is not just about the environment. The retrofitting of homes and the transition to low-carbon heating systems such as heat pumps and hydrogen boilers also has a vital role to play in delivering on the Chancellor’s promise of a green jobs revolution and creating badly-needed jobs in towns such as Birkenhead, which for far too long have suffered a chronic shortage of work and training opportunities.

It is imperative that the Government now reflect on the many failings of the green homes grant scheme and get us back on track to meeting our targets for retrofitting homes. That means working with industry leaders and local authorities to design a plan that is both ambitious and achievable and puts job creation and training opportunities for young people at its heart.