A £450m government scheme designed to drive the rollout of low-carbon heating options for homes is on track to achieve just half of its planned take-up rate, making a broader target of 600,000 installations a year by 2028 “unlikely to be met”, a House of Lords committee has warned.

Members of the Environment and Climate Change Committee said the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which launched in May last year, is “failing to deliver on its objectives” following a “disappointingly low take-up of grants”.

The three-year programme offers grants of £6,000 for the installation of ground-source heat pumps, and £5,000 for air-source heat pumps, and biomass boilers and other low-carbon heating solutions as an alternative to traditional gas boilers. However peers found that that the scheme had been poorly promoted and that public-awareness of low-carbon heating systems is inadequate.

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