It’s been just over a month since we bid farewell to BEIS (the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) and said hello to the hottest new acronym in the world of net zero politics: DESNZ (pronounced /deznez/, or the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, if you want to use its full name).
DESNZ’s objectives are to secure our long-term energy supply, bring down bills and halve inflation1, which are certainly bold in their ambition, even if it’s not quite clear yet how they will get to cutting inflation in half. BEIS got the boot in order to better focus on the separate elements which made up the old department. DESNZ is just one of three BEIS offshoots, with the other elements of BEIS being absorbed into the Department for Business and Trade, and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Interestingly, BEIS itself was a merger of two previous departments: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). I’m not sure why the government got rid of DECC, only to bring it back a month ago in a different flavour. Others were far more critical of the flip-flop, however2.
More interestingly, though, what does this all mean for our buildings? Well, the third from the top in the list of priorities is: “Improve the energy efficiency of UK homes, businesses and public sector buildings to meet the 15% demand reduction ambition”3. Assuming that the order has some significance, then the decarbonisation of our buildings would seem to be high on the agenda.
This is great news, but before we get too excited, it’s not exactly clear how DESNZ is going to achieve all this. For that, we might want to refer to the Skidmore Net Zero Review, which is what inspired the formation of DESNZ in the first place4.
The report is even more promising for the future of energy efficiency of buildings. Not only does energy efficiency for households feature prominently in the executive summary, making buildings more energy efficient generally lead the list of key actions for 2025:
So, while the formation of DESNZ may seem like just another bureaucratic reshuffling, it has the potential to make a real impact on the energy efficiency of our buildings, if the UK government commits to actually implementing the proposed legislation. It’s a big ‘if’, though. DECC couldn’t do it, BEIS struggled. Then we’ve got DLUHC in the mix (Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities5) which hasn’t done much in the past few years since its setup.
Which has got me asking: How many government departments does it take to make buildings safe and warm to be in?