Home Insulation

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Anna Dixon]

I commend the work of local organisations such as Beat the Cold and the charity Groundwork. I also hope that the Minister will say how he can help support those efforts locally.

Another local project that I would like to pay tribute to is Saltaire Retrofit Reimagined. It is a community-led home retrofit initiative supported by the UK shared prosperity fund, as well as the Footwork Trust and the Shipley area committee. It has focused on improving heating and energy efficiency in our beautiful listed heritage properties within the Saltaire world heritage site. The project engaged with homeowners, tenants and landlords to understand their perspectives on what effective energy and insulation retrofit should look like. Based on that, the team developed bespoke, heritage-sensitive guidance for upgrading listed homes that were originally built in the 1850s and 1860s, and which are some of the most challenging properties to retrofit. The blueprint and toolkit that it has produced removes both time and cost involved for individual homes to get surveys, and provides confidence that they will get planning permission to retrofit their listed homes. Its work is inspiring and supports our national goals to reduce energy and achieve net zero. I invite the Minister to visit Shipley and Saltaire and see at first hand the great work that it is undertaking—it is a national exemplar of heritage retrofit for homes.

Given the clear evidence of harm caused by poor-quality housing, it is concerning that under the previous Government, we saw measures under the energy efficiency obligation plummet from around 80,000 per month in early 2014 to less than 20,000 from mid-2016 to 2020. The Conservatives significantly reduced the rate of energy efficiency installations. Meanwhile, energy bills rocketed. Between 2020 and 2024, UK-based energy companies made a profit of £420 billion. I am proud that Labour not only proposed imposing a windfall tax on oil and gas companies in opposition, but increased it when in Government in 2024. We should adopt the polluter pays principle and ensure that we continue to tax excess profits. I greatly welcome the Government’s warm homes plan, a £13.2 billion commitment designed to improve home energy efficiency, tackle fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for raising the issue of warm homes. Does she agree with my constituents who have formed the WarmHomesLeics Coalition that insulation is one of the most proficient and efficient forms of climate action that we can take locally?

[Anna Dixon]

I absolutely agree that home insulation is essential in tackling not only rising energy bills but climate change. I hope the Minister will confirm the Government’s ambition to upgrade 5 million homes by the end of the current Parliament; it is a fantastic goal that will reduce energy bills.

We are also expanding the warm homes discount. I was pleased to see that 2.7 million families across the country will get £150 off their energy bills this winter, doubling the number of people able to access vital support. Around 900,000 families with children, and a total of 1.8 million households in fuel poverty, will receive extra support thanks to this Government, in addition to the winter fuel allowance being reinstated for those with incomes up to £35,000. Upgrading our homes not only puts money in people’s pockets but helps us tackle what is perhaps the biggest challenge of our age: climate change. According to the Northern Health Science Alliance, if all homes had an EPC standard of C or higher, emissions could be reduced by an estimated 97 million tonnes of CO2.

It is deeply concerning to see the political consensus around climate change fracture, and both the Tories and Reform jumping on board with Trump and climate sceptics, against all scientific evidence and sense. I welcome this Government taking climate action seriously. Labour’s clean power mission is right for both people and planet. It is the long-term solution to tackling energy insecurity.

It is vital, however, that the public can trust any support they receive to install energy efficient measures in their home. Recently, I have been contacted by two constituents who had cavity wall insulation fitted under the Government ECO4 scheme. The work was faulty and caused serious damage to the properties. My constituents then hired the solicitors firm SSB Law, which had gone door to door to look for business in particular areas of the country where problems with faulty cavity wall insulation were discovered. This law firm operated on a no win, no fee basis and took the construction firms’ insurers to court on behalf of the individuals.

The firm went ahead with the cases, often without the likelihood of winning, and did not have the appropriate litigation insurance for when it lost. This meant that, when the cases were lost, the construction companies’ insurers counter-sued for their legal costs, which led to the collapse of SSB Law, whose insurers would not pay out. In response, the construction companies’ insurers directly sued the people who engaged SSB Law. Not only were my constituents let down by shoddy workmanship done under these eco-schemes; they were then chased for large sums of money by disreputable law firms and insurers.

I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee; we held a hearing on the last Government’s ECO4 scheme that was frankly jaw-dropping. Some 98% of external wall insulation done under that scheme was faulty, and oversight outsourced to the private sector meant that companies got away with shoddy work and left people, including my constituents, in damp and mouldy homes. It is utterly shocking.

At the hearing, we pushed Government officials from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and Ofgem, the regulator, on how they would fix the problems and ensure that faulty work was put right, without its costing my constituents. Can the Minister please confirm what the Government are doing to address the issue of faulty insulation installations? How will they restore faith in schemes designed to insulate homes, as well as other energy-saving measures? It is vital that the Government rectify the mistakes of the disastrous ECO4 scheme and, more broadly, restore trust in Government-backed insulation schemes.

To conclude, poor-quality housing is a huge problem for my constituents in the villages and towns across the Shipley constituency, and for people up and down the country. It leads to higher energy bills, higher personal debt and higher levels of destitution. It also leads to increased health problems and increased excess deaths. Home insulation is a critical tool to mitigate those issues, and I am incredibly proud of the work that the Labour Government have begun to do, from the warm homes plan to establishing Great British Energy. In the run-up to last year’s general election, colleagues and I pledged that voting for a Labour Government would lead to a reduction in household energy bills. I am confident that, with the Chancellor’s announcement today in the Budget, we are going to deliver that; I would like to hear from the Minister about how ensuring that our homes are properly insulated is perhaps the best way to deliver that pledge.