Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether he plans to make funding available to local councils to (a) insulate council housing stock and (b) invest in developing local supply chains able to retrofit home insulation.
The 2019 Conservative Manifesto committed to a £3.8billion Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) over a 10-year period to improve the energy performance of social homes. Around £240million has been awarded to social landlords through the SHDF Demonstrator and Wave 1 schemes. A further £800million was secured for SHDF in the 2021 Spending Review.
BEIS has spent nearly £6million on skills training, delivering around 7000 training opportunities for the energy-efficiency and low-carbon-heating supply chains. BEIS will continue to monitor the market and is considering options on how to work with industry to support training to increase capacity and reduce shortages.