GOVERNMENT CLOSES GREEN HOMES GRANT TO NEW APPLICATIONS FROM 31ST MARCH
30 March 2021
BEIS has announced that the Green Homes Grant will not continue as planned from April 2021-March 2022.
The funding pledged for 2021/22, in the region of £300m, will be given to supplement the Local Authority delivery programme and Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Demonstrator which opened at the same time as the consumer incentive scheme. All in all this means that the total amount of money spent on the GHG will be far lower that the total that had been allocated by BEIS and Treasury. Government is presenting this as a £300m "funding boost".
The GHG will close to new applications at 5pm on 31st March 2021. All valid applications received before the deadline will be processed.
BEAMA has been one of a number of organisations calling for a longer term incentive or support scheme to help householders improve their properties with low carbon heat and energy efficiency measures, and we will remain in contact with Goverment on this.
On the local authority aspects, BEIS has said:
"The Local Authority Delivery element of the scheme has already successfully allocated £500 million of funding across the English regions, to support retrofit measures such as energy efficiency and low carbon heating in around 50,000 low-income households.
"In addition to the success of the Local Authority Delivery element of the Green Homes Grant scheme, we have seen an extremely positive response to the initial Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Demonstrator, which is currently delivering 19 projects across England and Scotland, delivering whole house retrofits to over 2,300 social homes, showcasing innovation in process and technology. We will build on this success by increasing the size of the first tranche of funding for the main Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund.
"The Local Authority Delivery scheme and the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund will require many of the same skills and training as the Green Home Grant Scheme. Investing in these skills and training remains a key priority for us, following the Government investment of £6.9 million in skills training for this industry in December 2020 which is ongoing. This is also why the Government is investing £2.5 billion in a National Skills Fund, helping to support hundreds of thousands of green jobs over the next decade. This approach will help us support a thriving retrofit industry to ensure we build back better after the pandemic and continue to deliver on our Net Zero ambitions."
