Recommendation 12

HM Government Acknowledged

As set out in our answer to recommendation 10, while we recognise the reasons why the Committee recommended the scheme should be extended, the decision before us was whether to continue with the scheme despite significant challenges or, redirect taxpayer funding to alternative efforts to decarbonise our housing stock. On balance our judgement was that it was more beneficial overall to close the voucher portion of the Green Homes Grant scheme but reform and expand its more successful Local Authority Delivery element. This allows us to protect the taxpayer and support the supply chain by committing funding to a delivery mechanism already proven to be effective. The Local Authority Delivery element of the Green Homes Grant Scheme has already successfully allocated £500 million of funding across the English regions, to support retrofit measures which improve energy efficiency and increase low carbon heating in circa 50,000 low-income households. Under this scheme, Local Authorities can deliver support to any low-income households in England, regardless of their tenure. This includes private landlords with low-income tenants; as under the voucher scheme landlords can access up to £5,000 of grant funding and must make a minimum 33% of the cost of upgrades. Our commitment to invest in decarbonising our buildings remains unwavering, and we recognise the importance of long-term funding to sustainably grow the installer base and supply chain. As such, £300 million of new funding will be made available to Local Authorities through an extension of the Local Authority Delivery and through additional support for social housing. We have seen a positive response to the initial Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Demonstrator, with funding provided to 19 projects and over 2300 social homes being retrofitted. We will build on this success by developing the delivery of the SHDF based on insights and learning for the SHDF Demonstrator. Whilst the additional £300million is funding for financial year 2021/21, delivery will continue to March 2023. The Local Authority Delivery scheme and the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund will require many of the same skills and training as the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme. Investing in these skills and training remains a key priority for us. This is why Government invested £6.9 million in skills training for this industry. The Green Homes Grant skills competition is continuing and is expected to deliver over 8,000 new 10 Energy efficiency of existing homes: Government Response skills training opportunities. Training providers are offering free or subsidised courses covering a wide range of skills and certifications across both energy efficiency and clean heat measures. Due to Covid 19 and the associated restrictions we have been unable to deliver face to face training as quickly as we had initially hoped. However, we have worked closely with partners to develop alternative methods of delivering training. We have also agreed an extension to training delivery timelines for providers to ensure that industry can continue to access the available support. Nonetheless, despite these initial challenges, we have received good interest and over 40% (3,000) training courses are underway or have been completed. This is also why the Government is investing £2.5 billion in a National Skills Fund, helping to support hundreds of thousands of green jobs over the next decade. This approach will help us support a thriving retrofit industry to ensure we build back better after the pandemic and continue to deliver on our Net Zero ambitions. In addition, from 2018 to March 2021 Government funded six energy efficiency supply chain demonstration projects designed to test different approaches to supporting local energy efficiency supply chain integration and project coordination. The anticipated outputs of these projects include insights into how the quality and consistency of retrofit work can be improved, how the skills and knowledge of supply chain actors can be boosted through training, and how sustainable business models for retrofit can best be established. An evaluation of the work of the six pilots is expected to be published during summer 2021, and the outputs will be used to inform future policy in this area.