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

To ask Her Majesty's Government why the future support for low carbon heat consultation failed to include the option of large-scale heat pump projects, and proposed support only for off-grid domestic settings and district heat initiatives.

The aim of the Clean Heat Grant scheme for heat pumps and biomass is to provide targeted support to households and small and medium-size enterprises, where upfront cost is a particular barrier in transitioning to low-carbon heat. The scheme is focussed on supporting the installer base that will be required to implement regulations to phase out the installation of high-carbon fossil fuel heating off the gas grid. The Government is committed to doing this during the 2020s, as set out in the Clean Growth Strategy.

While off-gas-grid areas are therefore the focus of the scheme, and BEIS expects uptake to be higher in such areas, we do not propose to exclude support for heat pumps on the gas grid. We are also proposing to support installations in non-domestic buildings up to a capacity of 45kW.

The Clean Heat Grant scheme has been designed as part of a broader package of measures to support the decarbonisation of heat in buildings and in heat networks. The Government intends to publish a Heat and Buildings Strategy later this year, which will set out the wider actions that we will take for reducing emissions from buildings.