Meeting of the Parliament 03 February 2016
We have allocated £103 million to tackle fuel poverty and energy efficiency in 2016-17, which will be used to help install energy efficiency measures, including solid wall insulation, in 14,000 homes, building on the more than 900,000 measures that have been delivered since 2008.
We have broadly maintained the expenditure that is available for fuel poverty and energy efficiency in the budgets that we have under our control, in what is a tough financial climate. The 2015-16 budget was increased over the course of the year with £15 million of consequentials from the United Kingdom Government’s green deal home improvement fund. That scheme was ended without warning by the UK Government and is therefore no longer available to us.
The Scottish Government is fully committed to eradicating fuel poverty in Scotland and overall we are on track to meet our statutory 2020 target of a 42 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but we recognise the scale of the challenge before us.