£5k grants to help households replace boilers with heat pumps

18 October 2021, 22:17 | Updated: 19 October 2021, 08:09

Minister says heat pumps will become more efficient and cheaper

Households will be offered grants of £5,000 to replace their gas boiler with a low carbon heat pump in a bid to cut emissions.

The Government announced the grants for homeowners in England and Wales as it confirmed a target for all new heating system installations to be low carbon by 2035.

They will be available from next April.

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Switching to low carbon heating in the coming years will cut emissions, and reduce the UK's dependency on fossil fuels and exposure to global price spikes in gas, ministers said.

It will also support up to 240,000 jobs across the UK by 2035, they added.

However, families are not going to be forced to remove their existing fossil fuel boilers, the Government insisted.

Heat pumps run on electricity and work like a fridge in reverse to extract energy from the air or ground.

The move forms part of the heat and buildings strategy being published on Tuesday, along with wider plans to cut UK climate emissions to net zero by 2050.

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Ending the sale of new fossil fuel boilers was welcomed as sending an important signal to the world in the run-up to key UN Cop26 climate talks hosted by the UK, but experts and campaigners warned the pot of funding for heat pumps was not enough.

The grants will be provided through a £450 million boiler upgrade scheme which forms part of more than £3.9 billion to cut carbon from heating and buildings over the next three years, including making social housing more energy efficient and cosier and reducing emissions from public buildings.

They will mean people installing a heat pump will pay a similar amount to the installation of traditional gas boilers, according to the plans.

There is also a £60 million innovation fund to make clean heat systems smaller and easier to install and cheaper to run.

Heat pumps currently cost an average £10,000 to install and do not necessarily deliver savings on running costs despite being much more efficient than gas, because green levies are higher on electricity than on gas.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: "As we clean up the way we heat our homes over the next decade, we are backing our brilliant innovators to make clean technology like heat pumps as cheap to buy and run as gas boilers - supporting thousands of green jobs.

"Our new grants will help homeowners make the switch sooner, without costing them extra, so that going green is the better choice when their boiler needs an upgrade."

Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng added: "Recent volatile global gas prices have highlighted the need to double down on our efforts to reduce Britain's reliance on fossil fuels and move away from gas boilers over the coming decade to protect consumers in long term.

"As the technology improves and costs plummet over the next decade, we expect low carbon heating systems will become the obvious, affordable choice for consumers."

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Jan Rosenow, Europe director at the Regulatory Assistance Project - which aims to accelerate the shift to clean, reliable and efficient energy - said there were many positive elements to the strategy.

He added: "The UK would be the first country in the world banning the installation of new fossil heating systems which will set an example to others. This is an important signal in the run-up to Cop26 in Glasgow."

He said the funding would only allow 30,000 homes to benefit from the grant - just enough to support current installation levels - and not enough to meet the Government's target to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.

Environmental campaigners at Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth also criticised the level of funding for heat pumps and energy efficiency measures in homes.

Ed Miliband, shadow business secretary, said: "As millions of families face an energy and cost-of-living crisis, this is a meagre, unambitious and wholly inadequate response.

"Families up and down the country desperately needed Labour's 10-year plan investing £6 billion a year for home insulation and zero carbon heating to cut bills by £400 per year, improve our energy security, create jobs and reduce carbon emissions."

But Greg Jackson, chief executive and founder of Octopus Energy, said that when the grant scheme launches, the company will install heat pumps at about the same cost as gas boilers and had begun training 1,000 engineers a year.

He said it would help kickstart a cheap, clean heating revolution, and scaling up the technology and supply chain in Britain would mean companies such as Octopus would soon be able to install heat pumps without Government support.

"Today we've crossed a massive milestone in our fight against climate change and to reduce Britain's reliance on expensive, dirty gas," he said.