In January 2026, the government published its Warm Homes Plan, described, without apparent irony, as “the biggest energy efficiency programme in British history.” At £15 billion, the headline figure is pretty significant. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme continues with its £7,500 grant for heat pumps (with £9,500 for oil boilers), now confirmed through to 2029/30.
A new consumer loan scheme will offer low or zero-interest finance for solar panels and batteries. The Warm Homes Local Grant will channel funding through local councils to upgrade the homes of low-income households. For a government that inherited a fractured, scandal-ridden ECO4 programme, the Warm Homes Plan at least represents an attempt to think seriously about what a coherent national retrofit strategy should look like.
Here at Renewable Heating Hub, we want this to succeed. We really do. The UK’s ageing housing stock is cold, inefficient and expensive to heat. The Climate Change Committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget is unambiguous: the annual rate of heat pump installations in existing residential properties needs to rise from 60,000 in 2023 to nearly 450,000 by 2030 and around 1.5 million by 2035. Heat pumps are not a niche technology or a policy experiment… they are the central mechanism by which Britain decarbonises domestic heating. We want the Warm Homes Plan to be the framework that makes this happen.
But wanting something to succeed and believing it will are two very different things. And right now, the evidence for the latter is thin.
The numbers that don’t add up
The UK sold 98,345 heat pumps in 2024… a record annual total and a rise of more than 56% on the previous year. That sounds impressive until you set it against the 450,000 the Climate Change Committee says we need annually by 2030. We are currently installing fewer than one in four of the heat pumps required. Analysis suggests the Warm Homes Plan is likely to miss the Climate Change Committee’s Balanced Pathway by around 200,000 heat pump installations a year in 2030, raising serious questions about whether the UK can meet its climate commitments.
The funding gap is not the only problem, though it is real. The consumer loan scheme (which will give homeowners who do not qualify for grants a route to finance heat pumps, solar panels and batteries) does not launch until April 2027. For the households that fall between the grant eligibility threshold and the ability to pay £10,000 to £15,000 upfront for a heat pump installation, there is currently no meaningful route in. They are told to wait. The Warm Homes Plan is, in part, a plan for 2027.
The elephant in every living room
There is a conversation the government and the industry both prefer to have quietly, and it concerns the electricity price. Typical capped prices in early 2026 are around 5.3p to 5.9p per kWh for gas versus approximately 27.7p per kWh for electricity, making electricity roughly four times more expensive per unit.
Heat pumps are dramatically more efficient than gas boilers, which partially offsets this gap. A well-designed, well-installed system achieving a seasonal coefficient of performance of 3.5 or above can deliver heat at a competitive cost. On a standard tariff, a heat pump heating costs around 8.4p per kWh of heat versus gas at approximately 7.5p per kWh for a modern condensing boiler… close, but still higher for the majority of households not on a dedicated heat pump tariff.
There is no further action on the electricity-to-gas price ratio in the Warm Homes Plan beyond measures announced in the November 2025 Budget, meaning the price ratio is likely to stay at around 4:1 from April 2026; keeping heat pump running costs close to gas boilers for most households.
The Climate Change Committee has consistently identified rebalancing the electricity-to-gas price ratio as a critical enabler of mass adoption. The government has consistently declined to act on it. Until that changes, every marketing campaign and awareness initiative faces the basic obstacle that a heat pump on a standard tariff is not obviously cheaper to run than the boiler it replaces. That is not a failure of the technology. It is a failure of energy policy.
450,000 installations a year, with this workforce?
Here is where we at Renewable Heating Hub will be blunt, because the numbers demand it. The target of 450,000 heat pump installations per year by 2030 is not just ambitious, given the current state of the installer workforce, it is alarming.
Just 50% of UK heating installers were actively working on heat pump installations in Q1 2025, down from 60% in Q1 2024, a decline despite increased grant funding and relaxed planning rules. There are currently only around 3,000 to 4,000 qualified heat pump specialists available nationally against projections requiring tens of thousands more by 2028 to 2030. A survey by City Plumbing found that 73% of respondents believe there are not enough qualified heat pump installers to meet government targets. We agree!
This is not a minor logistical problem to be solved with a £500 Heat Training Grant. It is a structural crisis hiding beneath optimistic policy announcements. The government’s £8 million Warm Homes Skills Programme and its £500 Heat Training Grant discounts are welcome… and utterly inadequate at the scale required.
We have spent years documenting what happens when heat pumps are installed by undertrained engineers working to volume targets in a system with weak oversight. The forums at Renewable Heating Hub are a living record of it: heat pump complaints last year reached their highest level ever, with systems running at sub-2.7 seasonal COPs, while homeowners are passed from MCS to consumer codes to certification bodies in complaints processes that drag on for years without resolution. Now we are being asked to believe that multiplying the installation rate by five, in four years, with a workforce that is shrinking in relative terms and is demonstrably underskilled, will somehow produce better outcomes than we have seen so far.
The Warm Homes Plan contains no credible answer to this. A vague commitment to workforce development and a series of training subsidies that were already expiring will not train tens of thousands of competent heat pump engineers by 2030. The Future Homes Standard, now in force for new builds, creates additional demand for exactly the skills the industry cannot currently supply.
What homeowners need to know right now
The Warm Homes Plan is not without merit. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant is real money and genuinely accessible. Permitted development rights have been relaxed, making most heat pump installations planning-permission-free. The commitment to six years of financial protection under the reformed MCS scheme (when it is fully rolled out by March 2027) is a meaningful improvement on the useless two-year Insurance Backed Guarantees that have left so many ECO4 recipients without recourse.
But the gap between political ambition and operational reality in the UK’s heat pump rollout has never been wider. If the Warm Homes Plan is to be anything more than the latest in a long line of well-intentioned declarations, the government needs to tackle the electricity-to-gas price ratio, fund a genuine workforce transformation programme, and accept that volume without quality is not a policy… it is the next scandal waiting to happen.
If you are considering a heat pump installation, our advice is unchanged and unwavering: do not rush, do not be pressured, check your installer’s track record obsessively and commission an independent assessment of your home’s suitability before a single pipe is touched. The grant is not going anywhere. Your home is.
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