The Conservative UK government is at last bowing to public pressure and will offer a grant to help people make their homes more energy efficient.
Called Eco Plus, it’s reported it will start next April and be worth up to £15,000 (A$26,800) per household. The money can be used to finance 75 per cent of the cost of measures such as cavity wall installation or smarter heating controls.
It will be managed by energy companies and will reportedly be announced by Business Secretary Grant Shapps. The scheme, costing £1 billion (A$1.79 billion), will last for three years and help around 70,000 homes.
The government is also to provide advice to householders on saving energy with a £25 million (A$44.71 million) social media campaign that was previously canceled by the last prime minister, Liz Truss, because she didn’t want to seem to be “nannying”.
Yet people have been complaining loudly about high energy bills and the demanding support for ways to reduce them.
The campaign will target those least needing the grants, in high housing tax bands, whereas the fuel poor tend to live in the lower housing tax bands.
In his Autumn statement – effectively a budget statement – the Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said he wanted to reduce energy from buildings by 15 per cent by 2030, a very modest ambition given that buildings are responsible for 40 per cent of energy use and the UK has declared an ambition to reach net zero by 2050.
Protesters, under the banner Insulate Britain, from September 2021 to September 2022, disrupted traffic on major roads. The protesters demanded that the government improve the insulation of all social housing in the UK by 2025 and retrofit all homes with improved insulation by 2030.
It was a group founded by six members of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion. They were arrested and sentenced to jail. Their actions were condemned at the time by Grant Shapps, who was then transport secretary.
Research by the Liberal Democrats had earlier shown that insulating Britons’ coldest homes could save £9 billion (A$16.1 billion).
Energy prices in Britain have more than doubled in the last few months, and the government response has been to subsidise bill payers, which, by next April, will have cost them billions.
Energy prices in European countries have also mostly gone up this year as countries have struggled to replace Russian gas with liquid natural gas imported from the Gulf states. This is not the reason why it has gone up in Britain; there it is due to the end of a price cap regime.
European Union energy ministers have blocked other policies to alleviate the acute energy crisis with a price cap, such as the launch of joint EU gas purchases and a quicker permit process for renewables. This is expected to be resolved in December.
This is such a good idea, I do think that it should go a lot further. 70,000 homes is simply a drop in the ocean. If this was a wide spread program, it would save the country a fortune in the long term and help the planet. This type of program needs to be rolled out carefully to ensure the people implementing it are fully trained and complying with all safety measures. But they really should implement a large scale training program for installers and expand the program as the workforce becomes available.