Families in new builds saddled with extra £6,000 energy bill

“The Future Homes Standard needs to be implemented without any further delay. The longer the government waits the greater the missed opportunity to build more energy efficient homes - saving customers money on their energy bills. Pioneering housebuilders have shown it can be done – the government now needs to get on with it.”

Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at the ECIU, said “Governments giving into house builder lobbying has left Britain with more poor quality homes, more dependent on foreign gas and more exposed to the highly volatile gas markets during the ongoing energy crisis. Unless we lower our gas demand by building better, warmer homes that run on electric heat pumps then we’ll just have to import more from abroad as the North Sea continues its decades-long decline in output. Establishing UK supply chains to build these high quality homes would create skilled jobs and growth.” 

Different standards for new builds were due to come in at different times. Homes built in 2016 in line with practices of the time – which were worse than the required standards [4] – will have spent an extra £1,000 on gas on average by the end of 2025 because of the scrapping of the basic Zero Carbon Homes standard for insulation. They will also have spent an extra £1,100 due to having a gas boiler rather than an electric heat pump, and an extra £3,900 on electricity from not having solar panels fitted, meaning they paid £6,000 extra on energy bills in 2017-2025. 

Homes built in 2019, which would have seen further uplifts to insulation under an advanced Zero Carbon Homes standard, have spent an extra £1,400 on gas on average between 2020 to 2025 due to lower levels of insulation, £750 extra due to not having a heat pump, and nearly £3,000 extra on electricity because of not having solar panels. Therefore, the total extra bills for homes built in 2019 reach £5,150.  

And homes built in 2022, despite being built to slightly tighter 2021 Building Regulations – and assuming that those standards were actually met – have still spent an extra £450 on gas on average because these 2021 standards for insulation were more lax than those due to come in from 2019, and almost as much again due to not having a heat pump. Extra electricity bills because of a lack of solar adds around £1,750 to bills, taking total extra energy bills to over £2,600. 

The Future Homes Standard, delayed from 2023 to 2025 under the Johnson Government [5], would see tighter insulation standards, and typically heat pumps and solar panels fitted to new builds, although housebuilders can meet the standard using a variety of technologies. 

The current Government is yet to publish the technical specification despite the supposed 2025 implementation date and there have been delays in Whitehall to the development of the Home Energy Model, which is used to calculate whether new homes would meet the standard [6].

This means that a 2025 date for implementation is increasingly unlikely, despite the near decade of delay, and the implications for energy independence if new builds are more reliant on gas. 

The Government’s Impact Assessment for the 2016 Zero Carbon Homes standard [7] found “additional costs of zero-carbon homes will be largely passed back to land-owners in reduced land value uplift”, rather than increasing new build sales prices.