12:34 George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)

It is no surprise that the Bill should have such support, for 1.7 million homes in the UK are off the gas grid—about 1.1 million in Great Britain and a further 600,000 in Northern Ireland. They are mainly in rural communities and they mostly rely on kerosene boilers for their heating. As we chart a course towards net zero, finding a low-carbon solution for these homes is going to be incredibly important. In 2017, the Government introduced the green growth strategy, which concluded that there should be a concept of electrification first in respect of such homes. That mantra has been repeated in consultations since, and in 2017 the Government also indicated that they wanted to seek to remove boilers from off-grid homes in these rural communities after 2026.

The Bill would establish a better path towards decarbonising our energy in these off-grid homes, because the technology now exists to adapt existing boilers to run not on kerosene but on hydrotreated vegetable oil, a renewable fuel derived from waste. The adaptation to the boilers is very modest, involving a small change to a nozzle, an adjustment in the pressure and sometimes a clean of the tank. The cost of the adaptation is no more than a few hundred pounds. The Government’s work in this area on their standard assessment procedure for building energy efficiency—the so-called SAP document—shows that switching to HVO as opposed to kerosene would lead to an 88% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which would be an extraordinary achievement.

In conclusion, if we are to meet our net zero ambitions and those crucial carbon budget staging posts in the meantime—4, 5 and 6—the key is to make it as easy as possible for people to make the change. The easier we make it and the more effort we put into making sure that they do not need to change their way of life, the faster the uptake will be; and the faster we get uptake, the quicker we will get to net zero.

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