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Energy White Paper

Yes, my Lords, we are looking at the building regulations. The Government have outlined the decent homes standard, which will ensure that homes have appropriate levels of insulation, and we have expressed the aspiration that all new homes should be zero-carbon by 2016. We are also looking at making government buildings and properties in the government estate zero-carbon. We are extending our carbon reduction programme to large-scale energy-intensive users such as hotels, supermarkets and local authorities, which will have to bear the programme in mind and make their buildings more efficient. We are also looking at the building regulations to see how we can reduce the number of barriers to technology such as CHP and ensure that many new housing developments and other buildings are supported by local energy generation, distributed energy and low-carbon energy. On microgeneration, we have the low-carbon building programme of £86 million, and we will introduce new planning regulations in the autumn to ensure that it is a lot easier for people to install wind turbines, solar panels and the rest on their homes without having to go through the whole planning process.