Sixth Form Colleges: Energy

(asked on 6th January 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to help support sixth-form colleges with rises in the cost of energy.


Answered by
Robert Halfon Portrait
Robert Halfon
This question was answered on 11th January 2023

The Department is keeping under review the potential impacts of the rising cost of energy on providers across the department’s remit.

Colleges are autonomous institutions responsible for their own financial sustainability and are taking actions to respond to inflationary pressures, for example through reducing energy consumption.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has outlined the range of support on energy cost increases that will be available for businesses, the public sector and households. As part of that, the Energy Bill Relief Scheme will provide a price reduction to ensure that all businesses and other non-domestic customers, including colleges, are protected from excessively high energy bills over this winter. Discounts will be applied to energy usage initially between 1 October 2022 and 31 March 2023.

Schools and colleges in England will also be allocated a share of £500 million in capital funding in the 2022/23 financial year to spend on energy efficiency upgrades. This comprises £447 million for schools and sixth form colleges and £53 million for further education colleges.

This funding will not only help schools and colleges save money, but it will also make them more energy efficient during the cold period and increase winter resilience for future years. Allocations were published on 6 December 2022 to help colleges plan and payments are expected to be made in January 2023.

The department assesses and reviews colleges’ financial health on a regular basis and uses this information to determine where support and intervention from the department, the Education Skills and Funding Agency and Further Education Commissioner can help colleges to improve their position. Further information can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/college-oversight-support-and-intervention.

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