Heat Trust, the consumer champion for heat networks, has welcomed recent progress with the regulation of heat networks.

However, it has warned that current regulatory plans still do not go far enough.

The planned regulations do not protect consumers from high, volatile and unregulated commercial energy costs, which mean that many consumers on heat networks pay significantly more for their heating than domestic gas customers. Heat networks buy the input energy (usually gas) that they need to generate their heat on the commercial energy market, where prices are uncapped.

Heat Trust has also warned against creating a two-tier regulatory system, where current government proposals mean that some consumers in social housing could have less rights than those in private housing to receive compensation for heat supply outages.

Finally, Heat Trust has also called on government to ensure that the costs of improving existing heat network performance under the forthcoming Heat Network Technical Assurance Scheme (HNTAS) don't fall directly to residents to fund.

Stephen Knight, Chief Executive of Heat Trust, said:

“We warmly welcome the government’s progress with regulation. But current plans fail to address the thorny issue of high and volatile heat prices, due to the unregulated nature of commercial energy prices. This cannot be ignored.

“We are also very concerned at the proposal to exempt housing associations from having to compensate their consumers for heat supply outages. This would create a system of two-tier regulation, with some social tenants having fewer rights to compensation for supply outages than those with private landlords. We hope Ofgem will re-think this ill-judged proposal.

“Finally, proposals to make operators address the efficiency of poorly performing heat networks are vital to cutting running costs for consumers. But the government needs to ensure that they don’t result in massive capital works bills falling to leaseholders, many of whom may already be faced with unaffordable cladding remediation costs.”

Heat Trust's full response to the government's consultation is published at https://www.heattrust.org/consultation-responses.

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