The UK Government has announced a new £5 million Heat Training Grant that is expected to support 10,000 trainees over the next two years to become “low carbon heating experts”.
It will provide grants of up to £500 to fund training with heating manufacturers such as Baxi, NIBE, Panasonic, Vaillant, Ideal Heating and Worcester-Bosch. This could cover the majority of the cost of a level three heat pump course, which takes around a week for an experience gas or oil heating installer to complete.
The manufacturers involved are additionally expected to offer additional discounts to the participating trainees, which could be worth a further £500 in product vouchers, additional training and other support.
“We are delighted to see the announcement by government of the funding for installers to become qualified to install heat pumps. There is great interest in future technologies and with this funding installers can gain the confidence and skills to offer heat pumps to their customers,” said Carl Arntzen, CEO of Worcester Bosch.
The government also provides funding for heat pump training through the Home Decarbonisation Skills Competition, but this new funding will now extend the support for heat pumps until at least 2025, and also includes training for heat networks.
The UK has a target of installing 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028, but a shortage of trained engineers is expected to be a key challenge for meeting this – as explored in a two-part article published by Current± last year.
Also announced today was over £9.7 million of funding which will go to four Heat Pump Ready projects, to help lower the cost of the technology and reduce the disruption to consumers by coordinating the wide-spread rollout in concentrated areas.
The £60 million Heat Pump Ready innovation programme was first announced in the government’s Heat and Buildings Strategy back in October 2021, and itself forms part of the £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
The projects – two in Oxfordshire and one each in Bristol and Cambridgeshire – have been successful in the second phase of funding as part of the Heat Pump Ready programme. It follows feasibility studies run over 11 locations as part of the first phase of the programme.
In response to today’s funding announcement, parliamentary undersecretary of state at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Lord Callanan, said: “This funding will give the rollout of heat pumps a huge boost by making them cheaper and easier to install, and importantly helping more households move away from costly fossil fuels.
“But we need a skilled workforce to deliver this, so we’re training thousands of people to be experts at installing heat pumps and heat networks, driving the country’s push towards net zero.”
The new funding follows the government announcing £15 million in funding to 24 projects aiming to reduce the cost and difficulties in installing heat pumps in September, which also formed part of Heat Pump Ready programme.
These programmes are running alongside the £450 million Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which offers £6,000 grants to support homeowners with the cost of heat pump, as well as there being a zero rate of VAT for the technology.
Work on installing heat pumps that have been purchased through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is expected to begin from late December this year.
The uptake of heat pumps in the UK has grown over the last year, with the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) reporting a record-breaking year in 2022, with more than 30,000 MCS-certified installations registered between air and ground source heat pump technologies.
However, this still lags behind the number needed if the UK is to meet its 600,000 target, which is a tenfold increase from installation rates in 2021.
An inquiry held by the Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee earlier this year concluded that the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is failing to deliver on its objectives, as the take-up of grants remains “disappointingly low.”
The key findings of this inquiry included that there is a shortage of heat-pump installers, holding back adoption of the technology, along with a lack of public awareness and the high upfront cost of the technology.
Heat pumps are expected the be key to decarbonising the heating sector in Britain, and increasingly programmes to support training are emerging as are lower cost options for consumes. For example, Octopus Energy recently announced that the purchase and installation of a heat pump could now cost as little as £2,500 after government grants – a similar price to gas boilers.
