BUS grant applications halved in December

Applications for Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) grants dropped by nearly half last month following the surge in interest sparked in November by the government’s decision to increase the funding it offers.

The latest statistics on the BUS, published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), shows there were 1,378 applications for the low carbon heating subsidy scheme in December.

This marked a 46% decrease compared with the 2,557 in November, which was the first full month after the increase in grants from £5,000 to £7,500 took effect.

However the volume of applications in December was still 49% higher than the 924 received during the same month in the year previously.

The statistics also show that 1,443 BUS vouchers were issued last month compared to 1,121 in December 2022 – a 29% increase.

And while December saw a 43% drop in the number of grants paid out from November’s record figure of 1,903, this decrease could be “partly administrative” because there were only three and five weeks of payments in the respective months.

Until the end of December 2023, a total of 27,041 BUS vouchers were issued. Nearly all (96%) of applications have been for air source heat pumps, the average cost of which has been £13,212 each.

DESNZ has also published figures showing that 2023 saw the second highest number of solar installations ever, with a total of 191,524 installations coming online.

However, the amount of new capacity in 2023 is only the fifth highest on record as most of the new installations were small in size, according to DESNZ.

December 2023 saw 10,291 installations, accounting for 45MW of capacity. While this is the lowest monthly figure since April 2022, these were much higher than average figures seen between 2016 and 2021, it said.

And there was a total of 15.7GW of solar capacity in the UK across 1.4 million installations by the end of December – an increase of just under 7% (1GW) over 2023.