Contribution
I would be more than happy to look at that. I have been working to help develop the warm homes plan and am looking particularly at area-based approaches; one of the most effective is when entire communities and neighbourhoods are upgraded at once. The effect is much larger, and neighbours can see the impact on their bills, which helps to spread the benefit.
The warm homes plan will set out in more detail how we are going to meet the challenge addressed in this debate. We have been working hard behind the scenes to get it right and will publish it in full soon. We have been clear from the moment we came into government about the scale of the ambition. My hon. Friend mentioned £13.5 billion; after the Budget today that number is actually £15 billion, and we have extended our ambition to upgrade 5 million homes.
As a student of history, I think of the first Labour Government in the 1920s with their housing Act—the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act 1924—which upgraded and subsidised half a million homes. What we are trying to do with the warm homes plan is 10 times that. That is the level of ambition we have. It means entire streets and whole neighbourhoods benefiting from solar panels, heat pumps, home batteries and better insulation. We have already kick-started that. We are not waiting for the plan to get on with delivery. We have allocated £1.8 billion through the warm homes local grant and warm homes social housing fund. We have set out proposals to increase minimum energy efficiency standards in the private rented sector in England and Wales to EPC C or equivalent by 2030 and introduced a minimum standard in the social rented sector, which is incredibly important for many of our constituents. Those measures, combined, will lift hundreds of thousands of households out of poverty.
For homeowners, we are making it cheaper and easier to install a heat pump. To the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), we announced the extension of the boiler upgrade scheme to new technologies last week, and we have an ongoing consultation on alternative technologies. We have doubled the funding for the boiler upgrade scheme to £295 million this year and, because of decisions made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor in the Budget, we will be increasing it year on year up to 2030. Just this month, as I said, the expansion has meant that we are able to extend the scheme to air-to-air heat pumps, a technology that I know many of our constituents were calling on the Government to make a change on last summer.
While we deliver the plan, we know there has to be short-term as well as longer-term action. That is why we have expanded the warm homes discount this year to every household where the billpayer is on a means-tested benefit. That is £150-worth of support directly to billpayers this winter. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) mentioned Beat the Cold; I met Fiona Miller yesterday and had a very good conversation with her about the work she is doing on data sharing between the NHS and her organisation. That is something I want to look at, and I am keen to visit Stoke-on-Trent Central to see in person the work that Beat the Cold is doing.
All those action that are taking place are good in the short term, but how do we tackle the cost of living and bring energy bills down for good? In the long term, we do that by pushing for our target of clean power by 2030: clean power generated in Britain, which we control and which will end the rollercoaster of energy bills that, bluntly, are at the moment decided by dictators and upheavals beyond our borders. We do that by upgrading homes with electrified, energy-efficient technologies, putting people in a position to benefit directly from clean, secure, affordable energy.
My immediate focus remains on some of the issues that we have heard about today, and on the people across the country living in homes that they can barely afford to heat. As we enter another winter, people should not have to choose between heating and eating. A large part of the reason the Chancellor took the action that she took in today’s Budget is that she wants to stop people having to make those incredibly difficult choices. When we publish it, the warm homes plan will set out our path to a future that we all want to see. We want warmer homes, no matter where we live or whether we rent or own—homes that are smarter, cheaper to run and greener, and are protected by a system that keeps them free of damp, mould and other issues. I welcome this debate, and I again congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley.
Question put and agreed to.