Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what plans he has to support off grid homes in rural areas decarbonise their home heating.

As stated in the Clean Growth Strategy (2017), the Government is committed to ‘phase out the installation of high carbon fossil fuel heating in homes not connected to the gas grid, starting with new homes, during the 2020s.’ The first part of this commitment, to decarbonise?new homes, is being met through the Future Home Standard, on which government consulted earlier this year. The Future Homes Standard will require new build homes to be future-proofed with low carbon heating and world-leading levels of energy efficiency, and is set to be introduced in 2025. We are developing proposals for phasing out fossil fuel heating in existing homes in off-gas-grid areas and will be consulting on them in due course.

Additionally, we are providing financial support to help decarbonise homes of the gas grid. This is being done through:

• The domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) – a support scheme for low carbon heat installations in domestic buildings that will remain open to new applicants until March 2022. As of July 2020, the domestic RHI has supported around 80,300 homes make the transition to low carbon heat.
• The Green Homes Grant – a government-funded voucher scheme launched in September 2020 to help consumers install energy efficiency and low carbon heating measures in their homes. This is available for domestic buildings in England, including rural properties, until March 2021. Under this new scheme, the government will fund up to two-thirds of the cost of home improvements for over 600,000 homes.

Further support will be provided from 2022 to 2024 through the Clean Heat Grant scheme. This will provide financial support to help consumers and small businesses transition to low carbon heating through the installation of heat pumps?and, in limited circumstances, biomass.