From our Swindon Correspondent:
The party says that the Warm Homes for All scheme will create 450,000 jobs over the next decade. Under the plans, low-income households would be able to apply for a grant, paying no upfront costs. They would keep most of the savings on their bills, though part would be used to pay for a proportion of the work. Wealthier households would be able to claim interest-free loans for the work, with the loans claimed back through their bills.
Labour said that, through the scheme, 6.34m homes would have heat pumps and 5.3m homes would have solar thermal systems by 2030. The party said the UK’s housing stock was among the worst insulated in Europe, with building electricity and heating the biggest source of emissions in Britain.
The party said the waste was costing households billions of pounds and pushing 3.5m of them into fuel poverty.
However, there are significant costs implied by the scheme. Labour calculates that delivering essential upgrades to the UK’s entire housing stock will cost about £250bn, or an average of £9,300 per house. The party pledged to provide £60bn of direct public subsidy for the programme, with the rest paid for “through energy savings”.
There have been these schemes to promote insulation of older houses for years now. They were doing it back in the 90s and early 00s. My parents own various properties and because they were tenanted they qualified for the work. And it was sh*t. The people doing the jobs did a half assed job, they didn’t care much about the standard of work, they were getting paid by the government per house, not by the house owner. So the owner had no control over their work. Several of the houses the insulation failed – they’d pumped some sort of material… Read more »
Badly done cavity wall insulation (particularly foam-based) and cladding* can cause horrendous damp problems on houses that weren’t designed for it.
* when it’s not contributing to the occupants burning alive
If Labour paid any attention to the Commonwealth they’d know that Australia tried this, it was an utter failure and, in the end, made energy matters worse.