EEH0124
Written evidence from the Climate Change Committee
Overview
There are currently about 29 million[1] homes in the UK, of which 19 million are below EPC C[2]. Of these, an estimated 8 million are solid wall properties and an estimated 1 million are within conservation areas.
Table 1: EPC rating by tenure, England[3]. | ||||||
EPC Rating | Owner Occupied | Private Rented | Social Rented | |||
| 000s | % | 000s | % | 000s | % |
A/B/C | 4,445 | 29.1 | 1,566 | 32.6 | 2,279 | 55.9 |
D/E | 10,101 | 66.0 | 2,983 | 62.1 | 1,760 | 43.2 |
F/G | 748 | 4.9 | 256 | 5.3 | 34 | .8 |
Our 6CB balanced net zero pathway includes 3.1m cavity walls insulated, along with 11m lofts and 3.4m solid walls (with a priority on fuel poor households, which make up 1.2m of these), along with floor insulation, heating controls and other measures.
In total, 15m households receive one of the main insulation measures (loft/wall/floor) and a further 8 million benefit from draught-proofing. All fuel poor homes receive a high efficiency upgrade.
We assume all lofts and practicable cavities can be insulated, but not all solid wall properties are insulated. This reflects the high costs of solid wall insulation. Our assessment also takes in to account lower estimate savings based on the NEED dataset, which uses metered energy consumption to provide estimates of how measures perform in-use.
There are currently around 18m properties which are owner-occupied, of which about 1.5m are fuel poor[4], leaving 16.5m ‘able-to-pay’ properties not currently covered by proposed standards outside of Scotland.
Around 47% of owner-occupied homes are currently covered by a mortgage[5].
Costs
- £250 billion is the total cost for the programme of upgrading existing homes, including low-carbon heat, in the Sixth Carbon Budget (Figure 1).
- Total investment in the programme of efficiency in existing homes in this scenario is around £45 billion to 2035 with a total spend of £55 billion by 2050. This compares to BEIS’s published estimate of £35-65 billion to achieve the EPC C standard.
- Total investment costs are less than £10,000 per household on average. 63% of homes need spend no more than £1000 on retrofitting energy efficiency measures.
Figure 1 Household investment and operating costs for existing homes, Balanced Pathway
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Sources: Element Energy for the CCC (2020) Development of trajectories for residential heat decarbonisation to inform the sixth carbon budget; CCC analysis.
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What works?
Energy efficiency – supplier obligations were effective in the UK, but German KfW bank shows how Green Deal could have worked, as does PACE in the US. For more detail, see the three supporting What Works studies published alongside our 2016 report, Next Steps for UK Heat Policy.
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