Our CEO Garry Felgate shares his thoughts on the impact of the Future Homes Standard, and its implications for the ongoing mission to ensure all UK homes benefit from being carbon free. 

This week’s announcement that the Future Homes Standard will require virtually all new homes to have solar panels and low-carbon heating systems – most likely heat pumps – is a gamechanger for the renewables sector and will transform the way hundreds of thousands of households in the UK heat and power their homes over the coming years.  

A standard to rapidly scale domestic renewable adoption  

Firstly, this is about scale. Last year, almost 60,000 MCS certified heat pumps were installed across the UK. While this represents significant growth when compared to installation volumes just five years ago, it’s far from the numbers needed to meet the Government’s target of installing 450,000 heat pumps a year (across both new and existing homes) by 2030 – let alone the 450,000 in existing homes alone that the Climate Change Committee says is needed to meet climate commitments. However, the Future Homes Standard is now set to rapidly accelerate this. By 2030, the Government expects 200,000 heat pumps to be installed in new homes every year – more than tripling the previous record number of heat pump installations for any year. Meanwhile, if all of the 1.5 million homes that the Government aims to have built by the end of this Parliament have solar panels of an average size, that would provide 6GW of clean energy generating capacity. That’s equivalent to two Sizewell C nuclear power stations – at zero cost to the taxpayer.  

Significant savings for households 

The importance of energy security and dangers of reliance on volatile fossil fuels could not be more salient. The Future Homes Standard demonstrates the enormous potential of the transition to domestic renewables – not only for energy security, but for the hundreds of thousands of households that stand to benefit via their energy bills and the increased comfort that a home with a heat pump offers. 

Our research shows that installing solar panels and a heat pump would save a household in a typical new home over £1,000 a year – increasing to £1,300 if battery storage is added. Recent polling conducted for The MCS Foundation shows that energy bills are one of the public’s biggest current worries. Building new homes with renewables will help lock in lower bills and permanently remove the worry of energy price spikes for those living in them.  

What happens next: transforming every home 

As the focus turns to implementation for the Future Homes Standard, it is vital to ensure households have confidence in the technologies their new homes will come with. It’s likely that for many households, this will be their first time using renewable energy systems to heat and power their homes. Housebuilders must consider quality and consumer confidence by ensuring every installation is delivered by an MCS certified installer, to MCS standards. 

MCS certification is a mark of quality that provides peace of mind to new customers, demonstrating that an installation has been delivered to industry-recognised standards. 

Going further – cutting the cost of electricity and committing to clean heat 

There is a positive lesson to be taken from the long journey to delivering the Future Homes Standard, about committing to the best long-term outcome, based on robust evidence. That is a principle The MCS Foundation will continue to apply to our efforts to scale up renewables and to increasingly important areas such as cutting the cost of electricity, which we believe should be done by moving levies into general taxation. Similarly, it is vital that the UK Government – and the Scottish and Welsh Governments – commit to clean heat so that all new heating systems emit zero carbon emissions from 2035.  

These measures, alongside the already positive steps forward that we’ve seen so far in 2026, including the Warm Homes Plan and the Future Homes Standard, which The MCS Foundation has welcomed and which we look forward to making a success, will help ensure all UK homes benefit from being carbon-free.