Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland: summary delivery report 2015-2016

Background

1. The Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland ( HEEPS) are the Scottish Government’s flagship delivery vehicles for tackling fuel poverty and improving the energy efficiency of the domestic housing stock. Launched in April 2013 HEEPS provide an offer of support to households across Scotland. The 2015/16 Programme had a total budget of £119m and funded a number of programmes.

2. The different HEEPS schemes are designed to work with other sources of funding to provide a broader enabling environment assisting the blending and leveraging of multiple sources of funding to deliver energy efficiency measures.

3. Details on delivery through schemes prior to HEEPS and previous HEEPS Programme report can be found here on the Energy Saving Trust website.

Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland 2015/16

4. As in previous years, for 2015/16 the majority of the Scottish Government’s budget for fuel poverty and domestic energy efficiency programmes was allocated to Area Based Schemes ( HEEPS: ABS). Area Based Schemes are delivered by Local Authorities and prioritise fuel poor areas, providing a range of insulation measures but focussing on harder to treat properties requiring more expensive interventions such as solid wall insulation. The budget for Area Based Schemes for 2015/16 was £65m, a £10m increase on the previous year.

5. The second element of HEEPS in 2015/16 was Warmer Homes Scotland ( HEEPS: WHS), which replaced the previous Energy Assistance Scheme and went live in September 2015. For 2015/16 the WHS budget was £16m.

6. 2015/16 also saw a continuation of the HEEPS: Cashback programme. This offered vouchers to householders and funding to social landlords to enable them to install energy efficiency measures to their property and had a total budget of £15m.

7. Finally, 2015/16 saw the introduction of HEEPS: Loans. These are interest free loans to households and Registered Social Landlords to enable the installation of energy efficiency measures. Loans of up to £10 000 were available to households looking to improve their properties. In 2015/16 the HEEPS: Loans budget was £14m.

Figure 1: Breakdown of the 2015/16 HEEPS Budget

HEEPS delivery in 2015/16

8. In total, across all our HEEPS schemes, over 28 000 measures were delivered to households across Scotland and we estimate that just over 26 000 households received these. Just under 50% of measures installed were solid wall insulation, just over a fifth were gas central heating systems and around a quarter were other insulation measures, the largest proportion of which was to cavity walls. In total just over 70% of measures delivered across HEEPS in 2015/16 were insulation with the remainder being heating. See Figure 2.

Figure 2: Breakdown of measures delivered by HEEPS in 2015/16

Delivery by programme

9. The range of programmes within HEEPS are designed to reach a variety of households with different needs. Warmer Homes Scotland for example is available to households who are most vulnerable to fuel poverty and tends to deliver heating replacements and improvements.

10. Figure A1 in Annex A shows the customers who received a measure from Warmer Homes Scotland broken down by primary benefit receipt. This demonstrates that for the majority of customers, Disability Living Allowance ( DLA) is the benefit that qualifies them for support It should be noted though that customers in receipt of DLA may also be in receipt of other, income-related benefits. Figure A2 shows the same group of customers broken down by age.

11. Our ABS programme is targeted on low income households who are identified by councils as being either fuel poor or at risk of being so and is primarily an insulation programme delivering solid wall and hard-to-treat cavity wall insulation. Our cashback and household loans scheme are open to all households across Scotland regardless of income and deliver a range of heating and insulation measures as shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Measures delivered across the HEEPS Programmes

	WHS	ABS	Household cashback	RSL cashback	HEEPS: Loans	Total
Heating	1,861	1,234	2,836	0	279	6,210
Solid wall insulation	63	11,819	1,154	1,128	68	14,232
Other insulation measures	963	5,200	617	760	41	6,618
Other		217	245	0	43	1,468
Total Measures	2,887	18,470	4,852	1,888	431	28,528
Total Households	2, 169	17,547	4,080	1,888	431	26,115

Carbon and Fuel Bill Savings

12. The installation of the energy efficiency measures outlined above also make a significant contribution to reducing CO2 emissions from Scottish households and in helping households save money by reducing their fuel bills. As Figure 3 shows each programme contributes to reducing household fuel bills and CO2 emissions. Cumulatively, the just over 28 000 measures installed in 2015/16 helped reduce the fuel bills of Scottish households by just under £7m and saved over 23, 000 tonnes of CO2. Figures 4 shows the savings made over the lifetime of the measures installed. And we can see that the 15/16 HEEPS programmes will help save 617 000 tonnes of CO2 and reduce fuel bills by almost £122m.

Figure 3: Annual fuel bill and CO2 savings from HEEPS measures

Figure 4: Lifetime CO2 and Fuel Bill savings by HEEPS in 2015/16

Delivery of the Energy Company Obligation ( ECO) in Scotland.

13. Our HEEPS schemes operate within a broader landscape of energy efficiency programmes operated by the UK Government. Our Area Based Schemes in particular are designed to work in tandem with the Energy Company Obligation ( ECO) to provide a blend of funding which can help develop larger schemes and assist the greatest number of households possible.

14. From April 2015 to March 2016 almost 38 000 households in Scotland received just over 45 000 measures via ECO. We do not have a full breakdown of the measures delivered for this period but we do know that almost 30% of all solid wall insulation delivered via ECO is in Scotland. This supports the view that our HEEPS schemes dovetails with ECO to provide greater numbers of this type of expensive insulation measures. To date, 29% more ECO measures have been delivered per household in Scotland than in the GB as a whole . This equates to 98 measures per 1000 Scottish households in comparison to 76 measures in the GB as a whole. More detailed information on ECO delivery can be found on the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy website here.

15. It is not possible to blend ECO with our Cashback scheme and, in 2015/16, it contributed only a small amount to our Warmer Homes Scotland scheme and nothing to our loan schemes. ECO funding is, however, typically blended with HEEPS: ABS and we expect councils to leverage ECO to support delivery. If we assume that 100% of work carried out on our HEEPS: ABS programme was done so in conjunction with ECO we can be reasonably confident that the total number of measures delivered in Scotland, across HEEPS and ECO is just over 55 000.

Advice and Support: Home Energy Scotland

16. The Scottish Government provides overall funding of around £9m to the Energy saving Trust to provide, among other things, the Home Energy Scotland advice and support service. This provides free and impartial advice to all householders in Scotland and ensures, where eligible, they can be referred to the most appropriate scheme specific to their personal circumstances. Home Energy Scotland can also can provide tailored advice for an individual’s own home and assist householders through the complaints process of Government energy efficiency schemes. Callers are offered a free benefits check to ensure they are receiving all the help and support they are entitled to. In 2015/16 the increase in income resulting from these benefit checks is estimated to be just over £3m.

17. We know that working closely with partner organisations helps us achieve the best outcome for householders. Home Energy Scotland provides a community liaison service to connect with other service providers and reach the most vulnerable people in the community. It also has referral agreements in place with a wide range of organisations who work with vulnerable households, including food banks, credit unions, Citizens Advice, NHS boards, fuel poverty projects and more. The community liaison officers provide a safety net home visit service to provide energy advice in the home to householders for whom advice over the phone is not sufficient/ appropriate and where there is no other local energy advice service able to provide advice in the home. In 2015/16 Home Energy Scotland supported vulnerable households by providing advice through 927 home visits.

18. Through a partnership between Home Energy Scotland and the social enterprise Citrus Energy we have also been able to expand on the range of support offered to consumers so that we can now offer referrals for free, impartial, advice and handholding support on switching energy supplier. We’ll report more fully on the outcomes we’ve seen for those who have gone on to switch supplier in the HEEPS Delivery Report for 2016/17.

Table 2: Engagement with Home Energy Scotland in 2015/16

Households in contact about Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland	43,148
Take-up of offers of help:
- households	38,763
- people in households	79,711
Energy saving advice (households)	36,832
Income maximisation referral (people) [1]	10,329
Referral to energy supplier for cost reduction	11,455
Area-based ( HEEPS- ABS) referrals (households) [2 3]	7,271
Other obligated supplier scheme referral including HHCRO (households) [2]	1,992
Warmer Homes Scotland referrals (households)	4,027

HEEPs since 2013/14

19. 2015/16 is the third year of HEEPs delivery. In that time the Energy Assistance Scheme has been replaced by Warmer Homes Scotland and HEEPS: Cashback and HEEPS: Loans have developed to offer assistance to all households across Scotland. Overall across the three years almost 100, 000 energy efficiency measures have been delivered to households all over Scotland through our HEEPS schemes (see Figure 5). Over the lifetime of the measures installed Scottish households will save over half a billion pounds in their fuel bills and almost 2.5m tonnes of CO2. The Scottish Government’s investment in HEEPS is approaching £300m and, in conjunction with the estimated £334m of ECO, overall investment in tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency in Scotland since 2013 is estimated to be over £600m.

Figure 5: Map of EAS, ABS and WHS installs since 2013

Total HEEPS Investment of £284m

Overall investment in domestic energy efficiency in Scotland £618m

96, 000 households assisted by HEEPS since 2013

2.42m tonnes of CO2 saved by our HEEPS programmes

£542m savings in household fuel bils by HEEPS