UK Climate Change Programme 2006 - JNCC - Defra

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Domestic
England 19 will be met and announced extra
funding of £140m between 2005-08 to tackle
fuel poverty. This has since been boosted by the
announcement in the 2005 Pre-Budget Report of
an additional £300m over the same period to
tackle fuel poverty across the UK. £250m of this
funding will help tackle fuel poverty in England,
taking total fuel poverty funding over the 2005-08
period to over £800m. Carbon dioxide savings
from Warm Front and other fuel poverty
programmes are expected to be 0.4 MtC by 2010.
57. The document also set out a number of changes
to the Warm Front Scheme, the Government’s
key tool for tackling fuel poverty in the private
sector in England, which seeks to target
vulnerable households to provide a range of
heating and insulation measures that can be
tailored to suit each individual property. These
changes have now been implemented. Warm
Front now offers central heating to all eligible
households and gives them the option to receive
the full range of appropriate measures over a
period of time, subject to the maximum amount
of grant that can be paid. Since the launch of the
Scheme in June 2000, over one million
households have been assisted.
58. A range of challenges lie ahead in tackling fuel
poverty. The Energy Review will consider whether
there are any further steps that the Government,
working with a wide cross-section of key
stakeholders, can take to ensure we meet our UK
goal of eradicating fuel poverty by 2016-18.
Decent Homes Standard
59. Since 2001 there has been a 31 per cent
reduction in the number of social sector homes
failing the Decent Home standard on the thermal
comfort criterion (from 1.3 to 0.9 million homes),
which is a key criterion of the standard. Also
since 2001, over 470,000 dwellings have received
work to improve their energy efficiency under the
decent homes programme or as part of wider
local authority work to update the stock. This
work is continuing. Local authorities typically
work very closely with EEC suppliers when
tackling their housing stock, so most of the
carbon savings from the Decent Homes
programme are attributed to EEC, and to a lesser
extent to Building Regulations. But some
additional activity does take place that is not
accounted for elsewhere, and savings from this
are conservatively estimated at 0.02 MtC per year.
60. The average SAP rating 20 of the social sector
stock rose to 58 by 2004 from 48 in 1996 and is
likely to rise further over the coming years. The
Decent Homes standard is a ‘trigger point’ for
action to improve energy efficiency. As social
landlords undertake works beyond the standard,
energy efficiency improvements are continuing, in
turn reducing carbon emissions.
Community Energy
61. In January 2002, the Government launched
Community Energy, a £50m UK-wide capital
programme for installing and refurbishing
community heating. Schemes are mainly based
on CHP with innovative approaches also
encouraged. The funding was provided by
Treasury’s Capital Modernisation Fund.
62. In December 2004, Defra announced an extra
£10m to extend the programme. The decision to
do this was based on initial strong demand and a
number of larger schemes with significant
outputs. However, experience has shown that
many larger schemes under the initial programme
could not complete within the 31 March 2007
spend deadline and did not go ahead. The
smaller schemes that can complete tend to be
expensive in relation to their outputs. The
following table summarises how the programme
has delivered against its targets and shows that
the programme has fallen well short of delivering
its objectives on all fronts.
63. The high drop out rate for larger schemes is the
main reason for the limited estimate of spend.
The situation would not improve appreciably if
we extended the spend deadline, as these larger
schemes cannot complete within a timescale
19 “To eradicate fuel poverty in vulnerable households in line with the Government’s fuel poverty strategic objective”.
20 SAP (2001) rating is on a scale from 1 to 120. This will be replaced on the 6 April 2006 with the SAP (2005) rating scale which comes into effect with the
Building Regulations.