Sir Grant Shapps is speaking in the elemental Arena at InstallerSHOW 2025, on the subject of ensuring retrofit delivers energy efficiency. We caught up with him to ask what he thinks of the government’s progress on decarbonisation and also to find out if he has got around to getting his own heat pump installed.
What are you hoping to see from the Warm Homes Plan?
First, let’s drop the pretence that it’s “a plan” at all – it’s really a bundle of re-branded pots: the Warm Homes: Local Grant, the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund, and a fledgling advice service. Collectively they’re worth about £3–4 billion a year, yet the election pledge was £13 billion over five years, and Treasury has pencilled in barely a quarter of that so far. I want to see the Chancellor lock in the full funding at the June Spending Review and publish a single delivery timetable so councils, installers and manufacturers can scale with confidence. Otherwise we’ll get the usual stop-start chaos and the insulation crews will be back on furlough by Christmas.
How do you feel about the achievements of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme?
Credit where it’s due: 57,000 vouchers issued and just over 51,000 heat-pump installations paid out by April 2025 is far better than the faltering beginnings of 2022. Raising the grant to £7,500 and trimming the planning rules clearly helped. But let’s be honest – at this pace it would take half a century to decarbonise Britain’s boilers. The government should automate the application process, let installers claim on behalf of households and, above all, expand the scheme’s budget in line with demand rather than closing the shutters once the year’s allocation runs out.
Did you get a heat pump installed in your own home, and if so, what has the experience taught you?
Not yet. My place is a 1930s house with solid walls with a conservatory tacked on the back – exactly the sort of awkward property that shows why fabric first matters. Until the insulation is sorted a heat pump would be like fitting a Rolls-Royce engine to a shopping trolley: impressive, but wildly inefficient. So I started on the path of upgrading our insulation. This didn’t turn out to be straightforward at all because our home is apparently non-standard and the conservatory is difficult to upgrade due to existing underfloor heating. The takeaway is simple: the technology works brilliantly in the right setting, but households need proper up-front advice, and they need electricity priced sensibly against gas. Get those two conditions right and I’ll happily join the heat-pump club.
What would you like to see the current government doing to unlock more spending on retrofit?
Three fixes, none of them rocket science. First, stability: roll the myriad grants into one evergreen, ten-year programme so investors and tradespeople can plan beyond the next fiscal event. Second, price signals: shift legacy levies off electricity bills and onto gas so the clean option is the cheap option. Third, finance: green mortgages, stamp-duty rebates for EPC improvements and 0 % VAT on all retrofit measures, not just heat pumps. Do that and the £3 billion of public money on the table will crowd-in ten times as much private capital—and, crucially, keep the retrofit supply chain busy long after the photo-ops are over.
To hear more from Sir Grant Shapps and hundreds of other speakers, come along to InstallerSHOW 2025 on 24-26 June at the NEC in Birmingham. Register for your FREE ticket here – parking is free too, sponsored by Amazon Business.
