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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to ensure sufficient provision of skilled alternative heat source technologies engineers to help facilitate the move away from gas boilers to new technologies, such as ground or air source heat pumps.

The Government is working closely with industry and the education sector to ensure that high-quality training is available for heat pump installers. This includes training for new heating engineers, and for existing heating engineers who do not yet have heat pump training.

As part of the Green Homes Grant Skills Competition, the Government awarded more than £6 million to support training for tradespeople delivering green home energy improvements, including heat pump installations.

We are also supporting the industry-led development of new heat pump upskilling courses for existing heating engineers. By the end of 2021, we expect industry to have the capacity to upskill thousands of heating installers per year to work on heat pumps.

Furthermore, BEIS together with the Department for Education is also working with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) to ensure that apprenticeships and T-Levels contain high quality heat pump training. Additionally, we are working with the Association of Colleges to ensure that further education providers are aware of future needs for heat pump installer skills, and to understand barriers to providing relevant training so that they can be better addressed.