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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of research carried out by the Institution of Engineering and Technology and Nottingham Trent University published in their report Scaling Up Retrofit 2050, and the report’s conclusions that meeting legal energy-savings target set in the Climate Change Act 2008 will not be possible by relying on new builds alone; and what plans they have to encourage more retrofitting of old, cold homes to meet 2050 climate targets.

The Government agrees that retrofit of existing buildings is a crucial part of meeting our goals. In the Clean Growth Strategy published last year, we set an aspiration that as many homes as possible should be upgraded to an Energy Performance Certificate Band C by 2035, where practical, cost-effective and affordable. We set out a range of policies and proposals towards meeting the aspiration, across both owner occupied and rented homes.

In May, my rt. hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced the Buildings mission under the Clean Growth Grand Challenge. This set an ambition to halve the energy use of new buildings by 2030, as well as halving the cost of reaching the same standard in existing buildings.

In order to reduce costs for retrofit and build supply chain capacity we are launching five demonstration projects to address the non-financial barriers to retrofit, such as supply chain fragmentation and the high hassle costs of installing measures.