Good afternoon everyone, and given the week that we’ve just had, I’m sure this is going to be maybe the second most exciting thing to come out of Manchester in the past 7 days. Can I just say how good it is to be here, not just because it’s a couple of degrees cooler here than it is in London, but also because I truly believe in the power of this sector to deliver, and the value that you add to people’s lives. I grew...
Good afternoon everyone, and given the week that we’ve just had, I’m sure this is going to be maybe the second most exciting thing to come out of Manchester in the past 7 days. Can I just say how good it is to be here, not just because it’s a couple of degrees cooler here than it is in London, but also because I truly believe in the power of this sector to deliver, and the value that you add to people’s lives. I grew up in a 4 in a block council flat in the area that I represent in parliament, and that shaped not only my life but also the life of my parents and grandparents who moved this block in the 1940s. That’s 3 generations, nearly 70 years under the same roof in Greenock, which is near Glasgow. So I know what it means to grow up in a home that gives you the best start in life. Before I became an MP I was a local councillor dealing with some of the issues that I know so many of you in this room today are grappling with poverty, deprivation, and many other issues that you see every single day. I’ve seen how hard it is for people at the moment especially to haul themselves up when their life is built on weak foundations, when they grow up in fuel poverty and they don’t have a secure, comfortable home to be the anchor in their life. So now as minister in this job, dealing not just with the home retrofit, social housing, energy efficiency, but also energy prices, my mission is to get more of what I had to people across the country, to finally address one of the greatest structural challenges we face in this country, the state of our housing stock. And you all know the statistics, we have some of the oldest homes in Europe, 40% of them were built before World War 2. That’s millions of people, many of whom live in social housing, who are growing up in old, cold, damp, leaking homes, which, because they’re overwhelmingly heated by gas, leave them especially vulnerable to the energy price shock we’ve seen in recent years. The cost of energy bills combined with the state of our housing stock traps too many people in a miserable cycle of energy debt and fuel poverty, wasting their money on inefficiently heated homes, unable to invest in the upgrades that will bring them some sense of relief. That’s why it’s our duty as a government to address this. I know the world’s eyes have been drawn to Westminster in recent days, but that doesn’t change the fact that across the country there are thousands and thousands of people living in fuel poverty, children growing up sick, living in constant fear of rising films, incubating disease caused by constant exposure to damp and mould. It shouldn’t have taken the death of Awaab Ishak, who died aged 2 in 2020 due to the effects of terrible mould exposure, to show just how urgent this crisis is. And like I promised you, whatever happens in government in the weeks ahead, addressing this will continue to be our work. We want to give people the best possible start in life. We want to give people pride, comfort and dignity in their homes. We want children to stop coming into school telling their teachers about being cold at home, and we want to protect people from the effects of wars that weren’t our choice, that are happening half a world away. And this government has acted over the past 2 years, a new Decent Homes Standard to deliver warmer, healthier homes with lower bills. Awaab’s Law, which has introduced strict time-bound requirements for social landlords to address emergency hazards and of course the Renters Rights Act, which carries these reforms into the private rented sector. And I’m proud that in the department I’m part of in Energy Security and Net Zero, we’ve introduced other measures to help some of the most vulnerable people in our country. We’ve expanded the £150 warm home discount to over 6 million families every winter into the next decade. We’ve stepped in to help heating oil customers at the start of the war in Iran and we’re preparing for all contingencies this autumn and winter to deal with the increasing cost of energy bills. But tackling these issues isn’t just about providing immediate cash support, though that is incredibly important, it’s also about the structural change that we need to see in our energy system and our housing system. And after decades of inertia in this country that requires massive investment, it requires big government, it requires interventionist government to do what needs to be done. And that’s where the Warm Homes Plan that we launched earlier in the year comes in. It’s the biggest upgrade to our nation’s housing stock in history. It’s £15 billion for insulation, solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, a whole range of technologies that can save families hundreds of pounds off their bills and give them more control over their energy. A central part of our mission is to ensure that we decide the price of our energy here at home, that our energy system is based on clean home-grown power that we control, and it will bring clean power into people’s homes so that they are the first to see the benefits. I just want to take some time today to make 3 points about the Warm Homes Plan. Firstly, this is unapologetically a social justice project. It’s a project to tackle poverty at its root cause, with £5 billion of that support going directly to those on low incomes in fuel poverty. People who won’t have to pay a penny for the home upgrades that will change their lives and break the vicious cycle that they’re trapped in. Second, if we are to meet the target of upgrading 5 million homes by 2030, we have to ensure that absolutely everyone can benefit from upgrades and are motivated to do so. To help households tackle the upfront costs of upgrades, the new Warm Homes Fund will see £1.7 billion allocated to low-and zero-interest loans. We’ve also doubled funding for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme and in response to the crisis in the Middle East, increased the grant to £9,000 for those currently using heating oil. But success will hinge on the confidence and trust of consumers, which is why the new Warm Homes Agency that we’re proposing will simplify the scheme administration and help households access trusted high-quality advice and routes to funding. We’re also overhauling the consumer protection landscape to rebuild the trust in the sector following the failures of ECO4 and GBIS . Third thing, we need to make sure that higher standards and high standards are maintained, that future generations will not have to go through and do this again. So we’re bringing in higher minimum energy efficiency standards with EPC C for rented homes by 2030 and EPC B for non-domestic buildings by 2031. And as well as upgrading existing homes, ensuring that every new home we build sets the example for where we want to be with our future home standards so that solar panels, clean heating and proper insulation are the new normal in homes that we build over the coming years. I know from working in devolved governments and from my role before being an MP as local councillor that this can’t be a Whitehall knows best agenda, this cannot be a top-down programme, and that’s why everything that we’re doing as part of the warm homes plan will be delivered alongside local government. Nearly £1.3 billion of grant funding has been allocated already to the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund Wave 3 and up to 295 billion pounds of additional funding will be available through the fund in 2026/2027 for existing Wave 3 grant recipients and some of the mayoral strategic authorities. Now from 2028 we plan to consolidate and integrate these schemes into a single scheme for low-income households still focused on an area-based delivery. And we know we can only achieve our mission if we take homeowners, landlords and businesses with us and that they trust that upgrading their buildings is an attractive and viable option and the local problems need local solutions. It’s been my pleasure in this job to meet people who have benefited from so many of these solutions, and at the start of doing this job I met someone called Jason in Bristol who had upgraded his home, who took me into his kitchen and insisted on showing me the spreadsheet of how much he was benefiting from having a heat pump and solar panels in his home all funded through local grant provided through WECA . And my mind often goes back to Jason when I am thinking about the work that we are doing, because his feeling of pride in his home is what I want to replicate up and down the country and the work that we are doing. The action we are taking will lift up to a million households out of fuel poverty by 2030 and I think that’s the future that all of us in this room want to see. A future where housing is no longer a luxury to live in and to have some disposable income after paying your energy bills each month to give people pride and dignity in their homes again, and in their communities and to stop tragedies like some of the tragedies we’ve seen over recent years from happening again. And I don’t think this is too much to ask if we work together on what we are trying to achieve, and in the wake of what we’ve seen in the Middle East during the Iran crisis I think you can see the demand that exists for these kind of changes. Record levels of inquiries about heat pumps, solar panels and EVs has shown the appetite that there is out there for clean technology, but we need to be able to meet it, and we need to be able to do that work together. So we absolutely need all of you in this room and so it’s my pleasure once again to be here today and to be able to take your questions. This is a partnership that can really deliver generational change in housing across the country so as I always say at these events, we can only do that with people in this room, challenging us, ensuring that we are going as far as we possibly can. And keep telling us what we need in the sector, what we need to be able to do more and what we need from our officials in the department to be able to do more, and I’m sure that together we can ensure as many people as possible get the pride and dignity from our home that’s fit for the future. Thank you.
Speech Brief