Great British Energy: Public Services and Renewable Energy

1. What steps Great British Energy is taking to help public services to use more renewable energy.

Thanks to the success of the initial scheme, Great British Energy is expanding the roll-out of solar panels for public services. Now, 50 more schools, 60 more NHS sites and 15 military sites will have their bills cut thanks to this Government, transferring money from the pockets of energy companies back into frontline services.

I warmly welcome the announcement of solar panels at Ladybarn primary school in Withington—it is great news for an excellent school in my patch and good news for the planet. I have also seen good investment in solar panels on hospital buildings in my patch, and we clearly need to scale that up. How can having Great British Energy as a publicly owned company help us to do that?

I congratulate those at Ladybarn primary school in my hon. Friend’s constituency on receiving solar panels. The benefit for the school is that it can spend more money on the things that are important for improving young people’s learning, rather than on its energy bills. Great British Energy is our idea for a publicly owned energy company—the first in 70 years—that will drive forward investment in the clean power transition and in supply chains, creating jobs across the country and bringing down bills for the public sector, as in these examples in the NHS and at military sites and schools, so that we can invest more in frontline services.

A constituent of mine wants to replace his gas boiler with renewable energy, which will cost him around £400. I am concerned by the prohibitive costs, which massively undermine our net zero ambitions. Can the Minister confirm what he and his Government are doing to remove those prohibitive costs?

We are working to reduce those costs. In fact, it has been announced just today that the boiler upgrade scheme will be made more accessible so that people can take advantage of renewable technologies. We want people to be able to bring down their own household bills. Of course, that also helps us as a country to move towards a clean energy system, which we know is what will bring down bills in the long run. We are doing work across Government to bring down those costs. There will come a tipping point very soon where it is much more economical to install those technologies than the alternatives, and that is when we will realise huge benefits for households right across the country.