Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 4
62nd Report - Faulty energy efficiency installations
Published 23 Jan 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Faulty energy efficiency installations All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
The Department’s senior officials took two years to recognise the scale of the problems, which led to many faulty installations that could have been avoided. This is unacceptable and demonstrates very poor overall supervision. The Department acted in October 2024 when TrustMark informed it of analysis indicating high levels of non-compliance with quality standards in external wall insulation. TrustMark only developed the analytical capabilities for interrogating its data and producing this kind of analysis in the latter half of 2024–prior to this it did not have the resources or systems to oversee what was happening on the ground. The Department should have done the due diligence on this before Trustmark were appointed to this role, however, the Department had access to other information that should have alerted it to the potential issues much earlier given that the ECO4 scheme started in April 2022. For example, TrustMark told us it had been sharing the results of its audits with the Department from 2022 and that when it started to identify the increased risk from 2023 into 2024, it undertook more audits to better 5 understand the level of risk. The Department’s failure to take minutes of its meetings with TrustMark meant it was unable to defend its position that it had not been alerted sooner. The Department also had risks to quality, assessments and standards on its programme risk register since November 2022 but did not take any proactive steps to prevent the risks materialising in the first place or escalate the risks appropriately. The Department gave the scheme virtually no senior level attention and should have carried out far more investigations much sooner. Its poor oversight of ECO4 and GBIS meant that senior leaders had assumed the quality assurance system was working when it was not. recommendation The Department should review its risk management and internal escalation systems so that issues identified within specific schemes are escalated swiftly and
From: Public Accounts Committee, 62nd Report - Faulty energy efficiency installations (HC 1229), 23 January 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 7 April 2026 (deadline 23 March 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with most of the Committee's recommendations, but disagrees with the recommendation to halt wall insulation installation without independent supervision and with the recommendation to refer fraud to the Serious Fraud Office.
- On wall insulation, it disagrees with the recommendation, noting that every household with external wall insulation under ECO4 and GBIS "is being and will be offered an on-site audit", subject to the householder accepting; internal wall insulation concerns are triaged and referred for audit where they meet "the threshold of risk factors".
- It agrees on the find-and-fix programme: TrustMark "currently intend" it to complete by May 2027, though the department states it is "unlikely" to deliver on a "significantly shorter timescale". It will update the Committee in writing every six months, first in June 2026.
- It disagrees with referring fraud across ECO to the Serious Fraud Office, stating that this "relates to an existing ongoing responsibility of the regulator", Ofgem, which can and does make referrals where appropriate.
- It agrees to publish an annual report to Parliament on retrofit schemes, with the first publication "before Autumn 2027", and "intends to consult" on the design of a reformed consumer protection system during summer 2026.