LONDON — A former British energy minister says this is the “biggest problem” holding back the country’s green efforts.
How do we equip Britain’s millions of old, cold and drafty homes with better insulation and cleaner heating systems?
After years of wrestling with the government over the same issue, Britain’s Conservatives are now going on the attack. As winter approaches, taking control of what they see as Labour’s key political blind spot, opponents accuse it of a real lack of ambition.
With Labor already facing the wrath of voters for cutting social security payments to help pensioners cope with heating bills, this may seem like an open target, but the problem is much deeper and the Conservatives are also involved.
One of the most influential figures in the energy sector has already fired a warning shot at new ministers. Emma Pinchbeck, president of Energy UK and incoming chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, said: “We are very worried, think about and care about heat, and I haven’t heard anything about heat from the new Labor government.” The government policy was announced last month.
“They said nothing about it,” said Martin Callanan, a Conservative senator and energy minister until July. “How to figure out home heating and small business heating, basically gas heating in the UK, is the biggest problem facing (the government).”
warning shot
If the UK is serious about meeting its climate targets and reducing foreign energy imports, the stakes could not be higher.
Replacing old boilers with heat pumps and cladding walls to stop heat escape are “key components” of Britain’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions, the National Audit Office, the government watchdog, said earlier this year.
Experts say the UK also needs to make progress on this issue to protect its energy security. Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, said: “Insulation is now critical to energy independence as we need to reduce gas demand to prevent rising imports as the inevitable decline in the North Sea continues. “He said.
But the new government has a real task ahead of it, and its early attempts to drastically improve Britain’s drafty homes do little to bode well for the future.
During the 15 years the Conservatives were in power, they too suffered from home heating policies. They have fought that failure publicly since leaving office.
The last government delayed the Clean Homes Market Mechanism (CHMM), a plan to encourage manufacturers to phase out dirty gas boilers. The reason: “Claire (Coutinho, Energy Minister) and Number 10 refused to understand.” Callanan argued. (Coutinho was angry when he responded that his colleagues in the department supporting CHMM “couldn’t argue their case.”)
Coutinho increased subsidies for homes to switch to heat pumps, a move that new Labor ministers followed this month. The number of households using the scheme continues to grow, but installations will need to increase 11-fold by 2028 to meet government targets, according to a 2024 National Audit Office report.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ main cladding programme, the £1 billion Great British Insulation Scheme, is so off track that analysts have calculated it will take just under 150 years to achieve its target.
“We support the movement to better insulate homes. This is one of the easiest ways we can actually reduce our carbon emissions and ensure we don’t waste the heat we generate,” said Andrew Bowie, now shadow energy secretary after the Conservatives were ousted in the July election.
He said the previous government had made “great strides” in improving home insulation, but claimed progress could have been made “even faster”.
“This is an issue we have struggled with throughout our time in government,” Callanan acknowledged. There weren’t enough trained workers to install the insulation, he said..
Other shadow ministers have also identified problems communicating the plan to the public and encouraging uptake. “It basically came down to the fact that people didn’t really understand the help that was available,” said Councilman Mark Garnier.
start labor
Now all this is Labour’s problem. Experts are already concerned that ambition is lacking.
The new government has already introduced “some useful adjustments to the existing scheme” for heat pump and insulation subsidies, Ralston said. But she warned: “There is some doubt that this will be enough and policy options are still on the table.”
Labor has fast-tracked a series of headline-grabbing energy policy decisions, from greening its vast solar farms to setting up state-owned clean energy company GB Energy. But Tory’s competitors aren’t convinced the product will do much for the basic problem of keeping people warm. “When you start going into the details of all this, it actually tends to be a little lacking,” Garnier said.
Labor has ditched its more ambitious home heating plans, slashing its green spending pledges before the election campaign even began. But the government went into government with big promises to spend more than £6 billion to upgrade five million homes with new heat pumps and insulation over the next five years.
But with the full government budget due later this month, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has already begun to backtrack on some fiscal commitments, claiming Labor inherited a £22 billion “black hole” from the last administration.
The government claims all this will be addressed in the upcoming “Warm Homes Plan”.
Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh told POLITICO this week: “If done right, the Warm Homes Plan will be an ambitious program to create warmer, cleaner homes that are cheaper to run. “This is a massive undertaking.”
Fahnbulleh told parliament last month that details of the plan would not be made public until after the spring spending review. When DESNZ announced its latest round of funding for social housing insulation last month, it acknowledged in a sentence buried deep inside the document that the £1.2 billion promised to that fund by the last government was no longer guaranteed.
“I think they’re going to be upset if they don’t continue with this,” Callanan said.
“They’re in government now,” Bowie said. “It’s up to them to develop policies that will change the situation in terms of home insulation.”
‘very poor’
While the Conservatives rejoice at Labour’s difficulties, the government is also under pressure from the left.
Current home heating policies are “insufficient”, said Green Party member and co-leader Adrian Ramsay. Labor must launch support that “affects every street in the country”, which is “what we need if we want everyone to benefit from warmer homes, lower bills and decarbonised heating,” he said.
Backbench Labor lawmakers, who still face voters anxious about rising energy bills, are also starting to see loopholes in the government’s decarbonization plans.
“People in my constituency are worried about how they will be able to afford to heat their homes this winter,” new Labor MP Laura Kyrke-Smith told parliament this week. Joe Morris, another Labor candidate elected this summer, said: “The poorest people in our communities are often forced to live in cold, drafty lands.”
Kyrke-Smith and Morris naturally blame the previous government. But in the meantime, Britons face another winter in cold, carbon-intensive homes.
“There are no easy political answers,” said Callanan, a former Tory energy minister.
