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Homeowners offered £5,000 grants to switch from gas boilers to electric heat pumps

Green groups warn the scheme will only see 90,000 heat pumps installed, well short of official targets

Homeowners will be offered a grant worth up to £5,000 to switch from gas boilers to more energy-efficient heat pumps “sooner”, Boris Johnson has confirmed.

But environmental campaigners immediately condemned the plans for not going far enough, warning the scheme will only lead to 90,000 heat pumps being installed.    

The new payments will be available from April next year to encourage people to install low carbon alternatives heating systems as part of the Government’s efforts to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. 

Ministers have also signalled that they will make a decision on transferring levies from electricity bills to gas bills next year in a bid to make the use of gas more expensive. This comes despite energy companies warning that consumers face significant gas price rises due to the soaring cost of wholesale gas. 

The measures form part of a £3.9bn building decarbonisation plan and will be joined by a raft of new policy announcements made by the Prime Minister in the run-up to COP26 in Glasgow next month.  

Under the Heat and Buildings Strategy published on Tuesday, homeowners will be incentivised to choose low-carbon heat pumps, with the grants intended to make the switch less expensive than installing a traditional gas boiler.

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Heat pumps typically cost around £10,000, and it is hoped the government subsidy will help offset the price until the technology becomes cheaper.  

The new £450m Boiler Upgrade Scheme will run for three years by which time they hope the cost of heat pumps will have been slashed by half. The announcement comes as households are seeing their energy bills rise. 

The Prime Minister said the new grant 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”.

Ministers have also committed to making a decision on the use of hydrogen in domestic heating systems by 2026. Hydrogen is a cheaper and greener alternative to natural gas, but there are safety concerns surrounding its use. 

Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “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 the long term.”  

The Government has set a target to ban the installation of new gas boilers in homes from 2035, with the aim that the UK will have net zero carbon emissions by 2050. 

But Mike Childs, Head of Science at Friends of the Earth, criticised the plans for being too “modest”. “£450 million pounds delivered via individual £5000 grants means 90,000 heat pump installations over three years. That just isn’t very much, and won’t meet the Prime Minister’s ambition of 600,000 a year by 2028.” 

Greenpeace warned it “stopped short of what is required”.

Officials are insistent that heat pumps will not be more expensive for consumers amid growing concerns that the Government’s green agenda will leave people out of pocket. 

In a bid to lower the cost of electric heat pumps, the Government has rolled out a new £60m programme to help grow the market, to make the systems smaller, cheaper and easier to install. 

What is a heat pump?

Heat pumps extract warmth from the air, the ground, or water – a bit like a fridge operating in reverse.

They are much more energy efficient than a gas boiler because they extract heat from the environment – which they can do even at low outside temperatures – and therefore produce around three times the energy they use.

As they are powered by electricity they are they provide greener heating – as British electricity is increasingly powered by low-carbon sources such as wind.

Heat pumps also cut local air pollutants emitted by boilers such as nitrogen dioxide.

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