Give landlords tax breaks to make ‘Europe’s leakiest homes’ more energy efficient and cut bills for tenants, Jeremy Hunt is told by Tory MPs who say it will also make Britain less dependent on foreign gas

Tory MPs are pushing the government to give domestic landlords tax breaks if they make their homes more energy efficient to cut bills and make Britain less dependent on foreign gas.

Jeremy Hunt is being urged to provide incentives for retrofitting improvements, including for insulation, to improve Britain’s housing stock, which has been called the leakiest in Europe.

It comes like other methods to get people to make their homes wobble. The Great British Insulation Scheme, which helps with the cost of improving heat retention in homes, will take decades to reach its target at its current rate of take-up.

Green Tories are now calling on the chancellor to take a Tory approach to getting landlords to improve the homes they rent out.

Former Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green said: “While the price of gas is now falling, improving energy efficiency is the only way to guarantee lower household bills permanently – by reducing the amount of gas we have to burn to keep warm.” The last two years have shown the cost of our dependence on imported gas.

‘Reducing this energy waste will strengthen our national energy security. For both homeowners and renters, it also means lower household bills in the long term, reduces our emissions and saves households money.

Therefore, the government should offer tax incentives to help people improve their energy efficiency, including landlords. One way to encourage more landlords to retrofit their houses is to let them claim the cost of energy efficiency improvements as a tax-deductible expense. This would be a win-win for landlords and tenants, improving the value of the property and lowering the energy bill.’

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The Conservative Environmental Network has previously called on the chancellor to use a number of tax breaks to improve energy efficiency in homes.

They include lower stamp duty rates for buyers buying well-insulated homes and discounts for those carrying out post-occupancy work.

Sam Payne, CEN’s climate program manager, added: ‘Improving energy efficiency is essential to reducing our gas consumption, which in turn makes us more energy secure and less dependent on imported gas. This means less heat escaping through leaky walls, windows and doors, resulting in lower household bills. With 70 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters believing the government should increase investment in energy efficiency, it is also a vote winner.

However, this cannot be achieved through regulation alone. There must be appropriate incentives, namely through tax breaks, to make it cheap and easy for people to increase the energy efficiency of their homes. Making energy efficiency upgrades tax deductible for landlords is a straightforward way to encourage these improvements in the private rented sector, benefiting both tenants through lower bills and landlords through more valuable properties.’

It comes as it was argued that households with insulation and clean technology such as heat pumps and electric cars are more ‘energy patriotic’ as they rely far less on imported fuel.

Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found that green conscious consumers make more use of UK energy and use less than half the imported fuel of a household that relies on gas and petrol.

People who want to be ‘energy patriotic’ should buy British by switching from gas boilers and petrol cars to cleaner alternatives that run on electricity increasingly powered by domestic wind and solar power, the ECIU suggested.

And the government should help those who cannot afford to invest in new technology by agreeing more contracts for new UK wind farms and ensuring homes can buy British for more of the power they use for appliances and lighting, the think tank argued.

ECIU analysis found that a typical household with a gas boiler, a petrol car and an average electricity demand relies on imported energy, mostly gas and oil, for almost 70 per cent of its total needs, around 17 megawatt hours (MWh) per year.

Former Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green said: “While the price of gas is now falling, improving energy efficiency is the only way to guarantee lower household bills permanently – by reducing the amount of gas we have to burn to keep warm.” The last two years have shown the cost of our dependence on imported gas.’

But a house with good insulation levels, using a heat pump and an electric car, will use less than half of that energy import (45 per cent), around 7.5 MWh per year, from gas used for electricity generation.

Houses with solar panels will also use about a third (36 percent) of the fuel imports of a typical home, at just 6 MWh per year, the analysis said.

The ECIU looked at the use of oil and gas imports alone, rather than “net imports”, which balances the amount of energy Britain brings in against the amount produced and exported, to give what it said was a more detailed picture of the country’s dependence on imported fuels.

Jess Ralston, energy analyst at the ECIU, said: “Those who want to be ‘energy patriotic’ and buy British homegrown energy should switch from gas boilers and petrol cars to electric heat pumps and electric cars, which increasingly run on British wind and solar energy. .

“As North Sea oil and gas production continues its inevitable decline, the dependence on foreign imports for households using boilers and internal combustion vehicles will only become more significant.

‘Generating more UK renewable energy and using it to power heat pumps and electric cars would get households and the UK as a whole off energy imports and remove the risk of the kind of price volatility we’ve seen in recent years.

“The government has increased the grant for heat pumps, but then cut other policies under intense lobbying pressure from gas boiler manufacturers, which is likely to mean fewer heat pumps sold, making households and the UK more dependent on foreign gas.”

A spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: ‘Almost half of all homes in England now have an EPC rating of C or above, up from just 14 per cent in 2010, and we are supporting families to switch to heat pumps , rather than forcing them, with our heat pump grant of £7,500 – one of the most generous schemes in Europe.

“At the same time, we are taking the common sense approach to reducing our dependence on imports by supporting domestic gas production, which is four times cleaner than importing liquefied natural gas from abroad.”