Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what support is in place for home owners with 25 year leases on solar panels, who are unable to get any equity from a Mortgage lender, or able to buy out or amend their solar panel leases.

The Government is aware that homeowners have leased their roof space to receive free solar panels under commercial “rent a roof” schemes.  Under these arrangements, the panel providers remain owners of the equipment and receive the Feed-in Tariffs (FIT) payments from the energy supplier, while the homeowner benefits from the savings they make on their electricity bills.

The FIT scheme allowed for such assignment of rights to FIT payments, but it did not prescribe how such arrangements should work: it was for the parties involved to arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement. While the FIT was a government scheme which provided the framework for an investment opportunity, the various marketing approaches and offers that commercial ‘rent a roof’ companies employed were not government schemes.