Four builds on the Heat and Buildings Strategy

Last Autumn, Government published its long-awaited Heat and Buildings Strategy, setting out its broad vision of a clean heat transition and a series of policy proposals to decarbonise the UK’s building stock.

Heat and buildings decarbonisation remains one of the toughest challenges in the transition to net zero – in terms of technical and social complexity. Further policy development is needed to create an enduring framework to bring forward the innovation needed in technologies, business models and consumer offerings to fully decarbonise the UK’s buildings stock over the next 20-30 years.

With energy bills now on the rise and the Climate Change Committee’s recent progress report highlighting the gap in policy to support heat decarbonisation and energy efficiency, the need for that enduring heat and buildings policy framework has never been greater.

The Catapult has put together a short paper on what we think such a framework could evolve into, highlighting some of the risks we see in the Heat and Buildings Strategy’s proposals and setting out four key ideas (or ‘builds’) to strengthen its policy measures.