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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to pages 141 and 142 of the report entitled, Net Zero, published by the Committee on Climate Change in May 2019, what steps he plans to take to (a) extend and (b) strengthen plans to improve energy efficiency in homes.

Homes in the UK represent 15% of carbon emissions and meeting the previous 2050 target would require largely eliminating emissions from our housing stock. With the Government’s new legally binding target to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions across the UK economy by 2050, our current and future actions to encourage home energy efficiency have become all the more crucial.

Through the Energy Company Obligation, we have supported energy efficiency improvements to over 2 million homes since 2013, and in April 2018 introduced regulations setting minimum energy efficiency standards for privately rented homes. We have committed to extend support for energy efficiency out to 2028, driving more than £6 billion of investment in domestic energy efficiency over the next ten years.

In the Clean Growth Strategy we set out our aspiration for as many homes as possible to achieve EPC Band C where cost effective, affordable and practical by 2035. This provides a good basis for net zero, providing a cost-effective level of energy efficiency to provide the basis for decarbonisation of heating systems.

In order to meet this aspiration, we are working to build a vibrant and sustainable market for energy efficiency through introducing a suite of mutually supporting policies and measures that will drive uptake of energy efficiency amongst homeowners. These policies have been informed in part to responses we received to the 2017 Building a Market for Energy Efficiency Call for Evidence and the recently published Green Finance strategy sets out some of our current and future actions in this area.

By 2025 the Government will also introduce a Future Homes Standard for new build homes to be future-proofed with low carbon heating and world leading levels of energy efficiency, to create healthy homes that are fit for the future, have low energy bills, and are better for the environment. We will provide additional details of the planned introduction of the Future Homes Standard within the 2019 consultation on the energy efficiency standards of the Building Regulations.