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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the role of energy efficiency in reducing the gap in the fourth and fifth carbon budgets; and if he will make a statement.

Energy efficiency has an important role to play in meeting our future carbon budgets.

For businesses we have set out our ambition to enable business consumers to reduce their energy usage by improving energy efficiency by at least 20% by 2030, potentially reducing carbon emissions by 22MtCO2e over the fifth Carbon Budget and saving billions of pounds through reduced energy costs.

We are undertaking a range of measures to deliver this, including developing a long-term trajectory for improving the energy performance of non-domestic privately rented buildings, with a consultation due in 2019 and consulting on a new energy efficiency scheme for small and medium sized enterprises. We have committed to improve industrial energy efficiency, including through a £315 million Industrial Energy Transformation Fund. In addition, we have put in place a range of ambitious measures to drive improved energy efficiency across the public sector.

For our homes, we have set an ambition for as many homes as possible to reach EPC Band C by 2035, and for all fuel poor homes to reach this standard by 2030, so far as reasonably practicable. We have also announced our Buildings Mission to halve the energy use of all new builds by 2030 and halve the cost of retrofitting existing buildings to a similar standard. This is supported by £170 Transforming Construction programme, matched by £250 million from industry, and by the recently announced Future Homes Standard, which will mean new build homes are future-proofed with low carbon heating and world leading levels of energy efficiency.

This builds on a range of wider policy, including our commitment to extend support for home energy efficiency out to 2028 at least at the level of the current Energy Company Obligation (£640m per year) and the minimum energy efficiency standards we have introduced to ensure that privately rented homes cannot be let from April 2018 if they are below an EPC Band E.