Renewable Heat Scheme for Homeowners: EIR release

Information requested

In November 2020, the Scottish Government made available up to £4.5m cashback incentive to help people install renewable systems in their homes. Can you advise how much of this fund has been claimed by homeowners, and how much has already been granted or made available to homeowners?

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA. This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

Response to your request

Under the HES Loan and Cashback scheme, from receipt of legally committed offer of funding, successful applicants had several months to claim funding for their installed measures. Due to this time lag, funding is not always claimed by applicants in the same financial year that it is allocated to them, and therefore it is not possible – in terms of funding paid out - to separate the initial £4.5m of cashback made available in November 2020 from the further cashback funding that was subsequently made available in financial year 2021-22.

Therefore the tables below outline both legally committed funding offers and the total value of funds paid (both Cashback and Loan) during 2020-21 and 2021-22.

Table 1: Value of legally committed funding offers made to applicants

	2020-21	2021-22	Total
Committed Loans	11,172,023	13,859,498	25,031,520
Committed Grants (Cashback)	3,190,670	14,334,358	17,525,028
TOTAL	14,362,693	28,193,855	42,556,548

Table 2: Total Value of funding paid to applicants

	2020-21	2021-22	Total
Loans	8,695,460	11,067,400	19,762,860
Grants (Cashback)	606,477	9,633,716	10,240,193
TOTAL	9,301,936	20,701,116	30,003,052

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