Boiler Upgrade Scheme: Here’s What You Need to Know

✔ You can now get a £7,500 heat pump grant

✔ The average home will be able to save £4,891 over 20 years

✔ But only 60,000 homes will benefit in the next three years

Homeowners in England and Wales can get £7,500 off the cost of a new air source heat pump or ground source heat pump, thanks to the government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme.

However, because the scheme is currently receiving a relatively paltry £450 million, a maximum of just 60,000 homes will be able to take advantage of the grant over its first three years.

That’s despite the Climate Change Committee (CCC) saying the UK needs to install 3.3 million heat pumps in existing homes by 2030 to reach net-zero.

If you’re interested in receiving a free quote for an air source heat pump, simply pop your details in this form and our installers will get back to you.

How will the scheme work?

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme will operate on a “first-come, first-served basis,” with customers having to rush to register their interest with air or ground source heat pump installers.

Installers will then apply for the £7,500 grant on behalf of customers, and remove that amount from the heat pump’s price.

This makes the grant simpler for homeowners than the now-defunct Green Homes Grant, which required you to apply for energy-saving improvements yourself.

An Energy Department spokesperson told us “there will also be limited support available for biomass boilers in rural areas, where strict air quality and emissions criteria are met.”

Are you eligible for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme?

You can consider yourself eligible for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme if you meet a few simple requirements:

• You must be a homeowner or small business owner
• Your property must be in England or Wales
• The building must have been issued an energy performance certificate (EPC) in the past 10 years
• You must follow one of the three EPC scenarios listed below

There are three valid paths to making sure your EPC is eligible:

• Your EPC contains no recommendations for loft or cavity wall insulation
• It contains one of these insulation recommendations, but you insulate your home between applying for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme and getting a heat pump installed
• Your property has an EPC or insulation exemption – for example, this may be the case if you own a listed building

If your property is a custom-built home, it won’t need an EPC to qualify, as you will have had to follow the latest eco-friendly building regulations.

If you meet all of these requirements, an installer can apply to get a discount on an air or ground source heat pump for you.

To qualify for a £7,500 biomass boiler discount, there are some extra criteria to fulfil, in addition to the ones listed above.

To start with, your property must be in a rural area (one with fewer than 10,000 residents), and have no mains gas connection.

The building must also meet high emissions standards, which the government has explained is “to mitigate any negative impact on air quality.”

Of course, that’s not how emissions work – but it’s certainly true that biomass boilers are better for the climate than gas boilers.

How do you apply?

From 23 May 2022 until the closure of the scheme in 2028, an installer will be able to apply for a voucher for a heat pump or biomass boiler installation, on a first come, first served basis.

After they receive the voucher, they’ll have three months to use it to install an air source heat pump or biomass boiler at your home, or six months if you’re getting a ground source heat pump installed.

After the installation has taken place, they’ll be able to redeem this voucher to reduce the overall cost.

The government has said “this approach allows for a smoother and simpler consumer journey, while maintaining certainty for installers.”

You can start getting quotes now, and when you agree on a figure, your installer will apply for the grant.

Does this make heat pumps affordable?

Yes. For 60,000 lucky homes, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme will reduce the average cost of an air source heat pump from £10,000 to £2,500 – less than a gas boiler.

According to our calculations on air source heat pump costs, moving from a gas boiler to a heat pump will save you £4,891 over its lifespan.

And this figure will increase if the price of gas stays high, and the price of electricity continues to fall.

Does the scheme go far enough?

No. 30,000 heat pumps per year isn’t even half of the current rate of installations, which saw 72,000 installed in 2022.

Currently, only 380,000 homes have heat pumps.

That means the UK is way off the 3.3 million mark that the CCC says the government needs to reach by 2030 to achieve its target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The adoption rate must rise to one million installations per year by 2030 to reach 3.3 million, so it’s unclear how 30,000 discounted heat pumps per year – at most – is sufficient.

Even the government’s own goal for heat pumps – of 600,000 per year by 2028 – seems like a distant dream if it won’t put serious money where its mouth is.

A government spokesperson told The Eco Experts: “Electric heat pumps will have a key role to play in decarbonising our homes and buildings” – but there’s no proof that the administration believes this.

For the UK government, which spends around one trillion pounds per year, this £150 million per year scheme is an insult to anyone who cares about the climate.

It’s not received even a quarter of the funding set aside for £2 billion Green Homes Grant, which the government bungled by neglecting to promote or explain it to the public.

And it’s just 2.7% of the £16.5 billion needed to put 3.3 million heat pumps in homes by the end of the decade.

Only 51% of people are even aware of heat pumps, according to our National Home Energy Survey, showing the lack of effort that’s come with the Boiler Upgrade Scheme.

Residential homes make up 16.4% of the UK’s emissions, and constitute the only major part of the nation’s carbon footprint that hasn’t fallen since 2011.

That seems unlikely to change any time soon.

The government’s response to concerns

We asked the government whether it thought the scheme was sufficient to reach the CCC’s 3.3 million heat pump target by 2030.

An Energy Department spokesperson told us: “The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is one of many policies supporting the development of the heat pump market towards 600,000 per year by [2028], with thousands of low-income homes already upgraded through schemes such as Home Upgrade Grant and Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund.

“It wouldn’t be right for the taxpayer to fund a new heat pump or clean heating system for every household, just as they do not for gas boilers now.”

We need to interrupt the quote here to point out that the scheme will not fully fund a clean heating system for anyone; it will only partly cut the initial cost, and it will only do so for a maximum of 20,000 homes per year.

The spokesperson continued: “This scheme will kickstart the market and we are working with industry to bring down costs with the aim of ensuring they are as cheap to buy and run as fossil fuel boilers by 2030.”