UK’s £450m boiler upgrade scheme is failing to deliver

theguardian.com:

A scheme to encourage UK households to upgrade their gas boilers to heat pumps and other low-carbon alternatives is failing to deliver after suffering a “disappointingly low” take-up, a parliamentary report has said.

Members of the House of Lords environment and climate change committee have written to ministers urging them to boost the profile of the £450m boiler upgrade scheme, after discovering just a third of its annual budget had been used since its launch last May.

The committee said that, by the end of January, £49.7m in vouchers had been issued, equating to 7,641 installations, according to Ofgem figures. The scheme has been allocated £150m a year in funds for three years.

Ministers first unveiled plans for £5,000 grants to allow people to install home heat pumps and other low-carbon boiler replacements in 2021 as part of a wider heat and buildings strategy design to help Britain meet its net zero goals.

The committee said that public awareness of low-carbon heating systems was “very limited” and promotion of the scheme had been “inadequate”. It also blamed a shortage of heat pump installers and “insufficient independent advice for homeowners” for the lack of take-up.

The committee claimed that efforts to present hydrogen as a solution for home heating were to blame. “Hydrogen is not a serious option for home heating for the short to medium-term and misleading messages, including from the government, are negatively affecting take-up of established low-carbon home heating technologies like heat pumps,” they said.

Proponents for hydrogen technologies have been lobbying government to boost its use across industry and in the home, while a proposed pilot using hydrogen in homes near Ellesmere Port has drawn opposition from