Max Wilkinson

My hon. Friend is entirely right. As she knows, the Bill includes a recommendation to set an industry standard, so that consumers can have confidence in what they are buying. Not only is the burden removed from homeowners and responsibility placed with developer, but the Bill creates an efficiency saving in human resources and materials. It is an entirely logical step to take. Installing solar panels on roofs while the houses are being built is at least 10% cheaper than retrofitting. There will be issues around cost, which Members might raise in interventions or in speeches, but Government estimates put the cost of mandatory solar panels on all new homes at around £5,200 per home. That sounds like a lot of money in isolation, but the average cost of a new build in the final quarter of 2024 was far in excess of £400,000, so we are talking about little more than 1% of the price of a new build home. That is next to nothing in the context of a monthly mortgage repayment, if we take the figure in raw form, and it would be offset by lower bills. This Bill would mandate that all new homes are built with solar generation technology covering the roof space—a minimum of 40% of the equivalent of the building’s ground-floor area.