UK ‘seriously lagging behind’ other nations on heat pumps

The UK sells and installs fewer heat pumps per household than nearly any other European country for which data is available, according to new Greenpeace research.

The data, which was provided to Greenpeace UK by the European Heat Pump Association, shows that the UK is “seriously lagging behind its European neighbours” on decarbonising its housing sector.

Of the 21 European countries for which data was available, the UK came joint last on heat pump sales last year, with just 1.3 heat pumps sold per 1,000 households.

The UK was second to last when it came to total installations, with just 10 per 1,000 households, according to the EHPA data.

Heat pump sales figures per household were ten times lower than in France, where they stand at 14 per 1,000, and 32 times lower than in Norway.

The disparity is “even greater” for installations with 60 times fewer heat pumps than in Norway, which topped the charts for both sales and the number of devices fitted.

Of the 21 countries analysed, only in Hungary was lower than the UK on both metrics.

Greenpeace UK’s policy director Doug Parr said: “The UK already has the draughtiest homes in western Europe, now we’re last when it comes to clean heating too. We perform better in Eurovision than we do decarbonising our homes, and that’s saying something.

“If the government wants a chance to catch up, it needs a proper strategy and enough cash to clean up our homes on a massive scale. This means substantial grants for heat pump installations, especially for the poorest families, removing VAT on green home technologies and a phase out of gas boilers early next decade.

“Without these measures, which many of our European neighbours already have in place, we’ll fall further behind on the ‘green homes’ leaderboard. But more importantly we’ll fail to remove emissions from homes fast enough to meet our legally-binding climate obligations.”

The analysis by Greenpeace UK has been published on the same day that the Green Alliance has released new figures showing that the there is still a “significant gap” of 746 MtCO2 e towards meeting the UK’s emissions target for the fifth carbon budget period of 2028-32).

However, it says that if the UK government committed to the housing and transport policies, which are currently out for consultation, it would close more than a third of this gap.