Families living in new-build homes paid an extra £1000 in gas bills between 2017 and 2025 because higher standards on energy efficiency were scrapped, according to new analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), and they have missed the opportunity to save £5000 by using a heat pump combined with rooftop PV to heat their homes. The ECIU says that overall the homeowners spent an extra £5 billion in energy bills between 2017 and 2025.
The Zero Carbon Homes standard was scrapped in 2016 and its replacement, the Future Homes Standard, is facing delays in Whitehall. ECIU says this resulted in around 1.35 million new homes in England being built to lower standards of insulation between 2016 and 2024.
Baroness Joanna Penn, Conservative Peer and former Treasury and Housing and Local Government Minister, said “The Future Homes Standard needs to be implemented without any further delay. The longer the government waits the greater the missed opportunity to build more energy efficient homes – saving customers money on their energy bills. Pioneering housebuilders have shown it can be done – the government now needs to get on with it.”
Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at the ECIU, said “Governments giving into house builder lobbying has left Britain with more poor quality homes, more dependent on foreign gas and more exposed to the highly volatile gas markets during the ongoing energy crisis. Unless we lower our gas demand by building better, warmer homes that run on electric heat pumps then we’ll just have to import more from abroad as the North Sea continues its decades-long decline in output. Establishing UK supply chains to build these high quality homes would create skilled jobs and growth.”
ECIU says different standards for new builds were due to come in at different times.
It calculates that homes built in 2019, which would have seen further uplifts to insulation because they had to meet an advanced Zero Carbon Homes standard, have spent £1,400 on gas they would not have spent under new standards, £750 extra due to not having a heat pump, and nearly £3,000 extra on electricity because of not having solar panels.
Homes built in 2022, despite being built to slightly tighter 2021 Building Regulations have still spent an extra £450 on gas on average.
The Future Homes Standard, delayed from 2023 to 2025 under the Johnson government, would see tighter insulation standards, and typically heat pumps and solar panels fitted to new builds, although housebuilders can meet the standard using a variety of technologies.