The new energy-efficient home fund said to be called “eco plus” will provide households with up to £15,000 of funding to cover the cost of energy saving improvements.

For the next three years, the Government has committed £1 billion. They will pay up to 75% of the cost, while the remainder is paid by the households contribution.

According to the Times, the plan will see eligible households able to fund the installation of loft and cavity wall insulation as well as smart heating systems, including advanced thermostats and thermostatic valves.

Households that make energy-efficient improvements are likely to save hundreds of pounds every year on their energy bills.

This will also help homeowners and landlords to raise the rating of their Energy Performance Certificate and gain access to better mortgage rates on some of the Green mortgages as well as getting rental properties to acheive a C rating for the proposed Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards changes in 2025. The EPC will also give guidance on how to make your home more energy efficient.

Who is eligible for the eco-plus fund?

Middle earners are considered to be people who earn around the median income in the UK. According to Statista, the median household disposable income in the UK was £31,400 in the financial year ending 2021.

According to yourmoney.com, their research found “that due to the cost-of-living crisis, consumers are more cautious about spending money on retrofitting and other measures to improve energy efficiency and save money in the long term. Funding in this space should help ease these financial concerns and get this crucial aspect of the net zero agenda back on track.”

Exact details of who will be eligible have yet to be released but the grants are expected to be offered to people living in homes in Council Tax bands A to D.

It is still unknown if private landlords will be able to access this funding which would massively help them to improve their housing stock to the proposed C energy rating on the EPC.

Which energy saving improvements will eco-plus cover?

According to the governments consultation document, the scheme proposes to cover:

• cavity wall insulation
• flat roof insulation
• loft insulation
• park home insulation
• pitched roof insulation
• room-in-roof insulation
• secondary heating controls
• solid floor insulation
• solid wall insulation (both external and internal)
• under floor insulation

When will the eco-plus fund come into force?

How will eco-plus work?

The scheme will probably operate through approved contractors, so there is unlikely to be any DIY element involved.

The householder will probably be offered a hierarchy of measures based on addressing the improvements with the biggest saving in energy and the lowest pay back times first.

So, it’s unlikely that you could just have the improvement you want without addressing other higher ranking savings improvement first.

A recent article in The Times estimates that installing loft insulation could cost up to £1,100 – but would save £640 a year on energy bills, and acheive a 2 year payback period.

However, as domestic energy assessors our own case studies shows savings are a lot less optomistic than the estimates shown above and we will soon be publishing some real life scenarios to demonstrate this.

What we’ve learnt from previous grant schemes

Government grant schemes are always welcome. But inevitable they seem to go one of 2 ways.

1. They are either very successful and there is a high demand to access a limited amount of money, then the scheme is stopped because of it’s own success.
2. The scheme flops because it is over complicated and difficult to access with too many hoops for the householder to jump through. So the scheme stops due to it’s lack of success.

With this proposed scheme, we believe there is again too much emphasis on the low hanging fruit of cavity wall insulation and loft insulation. Many of these properties have already been upgraded on various grant schemes over the past 15 years and are now increasingly difficult to come across.

In 2017 we ran a door to door canvas team (before the No Cold Calling Zone days), offering free cavity wall insulation under one of the old ECO grants.

Even at that time these grants were only offered free because the energy suppliers weren’t hitting their targets of what was called able to pay customers where a customer contribution towards the work was required for those not on a benefit.

Anyway, we canvassed every potential cavity wall home in our medium sized town in Bedfordshire which has a population of 170,000 making a note of which homes already had cavity wall insulation and which ones didn’t which we would also target later by mail shot. We did the whole town which took 3 weeks.

The results we found were staggering. Our findings showed that 80% of the homes already had cavity wall insulation installed which was significantly different to what the government were saying about the number of potential homes that were left to treat.

Of the 20% of homes that weren’t done many had access issues or elderly customers who simply didn’t want anything done to the property regardless of whether it was free or not.

Cavity wall and loft insulation will always be important improvements, but this scheme should also offer improvements where there is still a lot of opportunity to improve the energy efficiency in our homes.

Things like internal or external wall insulation and solar pv which offer great savings but are more expensive to install should now be seriously addressed by new grant policies.