Centrica calls for immediate ban on fossil fuel heating in new homes

The head of Centrica’s consumer division has urged the government to immediately introduce its proposed ban on the installation of fossil fuel heating systems in new homes rather than waiting until the middle of the current decade.

Sarwjit Sambhi, chief executive of Centrica Consumer, made the plea in a collection of essays published by the conservative think tank Bright Blue, all focussing on the actions needed to meet the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.

The government has proposed to implement the ban as part of its Future Homes Standard in 2025 but Sambhi said there was “no real reason” to wait so long, particularly as housebuilders had once expected to be subject to a similar standard already.

He said further delay risks locking in carbon emissions from the roughly 200,000 built in the UK each year, adding: “Building new homes, designed from the ground up to be low-carbon, is both the most efficient and economic way to save carbon. It has already been proven at scale overseas.”

Another essay by Alasdair MacEwen, former Treasury official and now director of communications consultancy Culmer Raphael, called for all the department’s policies to be assessed for their carbon impact.

He said the Treasury already produces a “scorecard” to gauge their impact on public borrowing as part of their budgets and spending reviews:  “Setting the scorecard against a net carbon contribution could fundamentally change policy-making so that every Treasury policy had to be evaluated against in carbon impact, guaranteeing that even when rapid policy-making is needed – as in the current pandemic – that decarbonisation is central considered and not just an ‘add on’.”

MacEwen also called for climate change to be “further centralised within the Tresury’s remit” to ensure the issue is woven through all policy making. He noted that the French president Emmanuel Macron recently tried to achieve this by designating his energy minister as the third most senior in government: “This failed because even through climate change rose in the policy hierarchy, it was not sufficiently part of the finance minister’s remit.

“Instead, the Treasury should be the climate leader within government, not its auditor. Without climate policy centralised and integrated into financial and fiscal leavers, the capacity for change will be inadequate, precisely because climate action is fundamental to the UK’s future functioning and economic viability.”