Carbon Emissions

(asked on 17th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, with reference to the Climate Change Committee’s UK Health Expert Advisory Group’s report entitled Sustainable Health Equity: Achieving a Net Zero UK, published on 6 November 2020, what assessment he has ​made of the potential merits of the four recommendations of that report including setting a target date to eliminate home installations of wood burning and gas stoves and prioritising elimination in urban areas.


Answered by
Eddie Hughes Portrait
Eddie Hughes
This question was answered on 20th January 2022

I welcome the Climate Change Committee’s report on Sustainable Health Equity: Achieving a Net Zero UK. My Department works closely with other government departments to deliver homes that are energy efficient, climate resilient and healthy.

On 15 December 2021 the Department published the government response to the Future Buildings Standard consultation, brought in the 2021 uplift to the Building Regulations and published a range of accompanying new statutory guidance.

The uplift is an important stepping stone on our way to implementation of the Future Homes Standard and the Future Buildings Standard from 2025. Together, the policy set out in the government response to the Future Buildings Standard consultation, and the Future Homes Standard consultation (published in January 2021) will ensure that new homes and buildings are highly efficient, with significantly lower carbon emissions. From June 2022, when the new regulations come into force, new homes will be expected to produce around 30% fewer carbon emissions and new non-domestic buildings will be expected to produce 27% fewer carbon emissions, becoming zero-carbon over time as the electricity grid continues to decarbonise. The consultation, uplift and new statutory guidance also delivered improvements to ventilation, and a new requirement to mitigate overheating in new-build residential buildings, particularly important for adapting to an increasingly warm climate.

We are considering how the planning system can further support our commitment to reaching net zero. As set out in the Net Zero Strategy, we will make sure that the reformed planning system supports our efforts to combat climate change and help bring greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.

The Government Response to the Committee on Climate Change’s 2020 Progress Report to Parliament sets out the further action they are taking across all sectors of the economy to reduce emissions and deliver net zero.

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