My Christmas wish list for Britain’s homes

Most years, just before Christmas, I find myself on a cold building site somewhere in Britain. 

The scaffolding is half down. There is a radio playing Mariah Carey in the background. Someone is trying to keep their hi-vis over a Christmas jumper. And a family has turned up to look round the home they will be moving into in the new year.

The house looks brilliant. Fresh paint. Shiny kitchen. New carpets the kids are scared to walk on. A neat little garden that will come alive in spring. We do the usual tour. They tell me where the Christmas tree will go. We talk about storage, about light, about finally having a bit more space.

Then, almost every time, the chat turns to ‘How much will it cost to heat?’ ‘What happens if energy prices shoot up again?’ 

And I am left asking why, in 2025, they are still being handed a brand new gas boiler?

In the same week, I will have spoken to brilliant heating engineers and installers who want to do things differently. They want to fit heat pumps. 

They want to design proper, efficient systems. They want to take on apprentices and teach the next generation. 

What holds them back is not talent. It is not effort. It is uncertainty.

My Christmas wish list 

Across the country it feels like the decorations are up and we are all waiting for someone to switch the Christmas lights on. 

Installers are ready. Manufacturers are ready. Homeowners are asking for help. Yet we are still waiting for the Warm Homes Plan. Waiting for the Future Homes Standard. Waiting for Scotland’s Heat in Buildings Bill. 

I could easily write another angry column about all of that. 

But it is Christmas and I would rather write something positive, a wish list. Not for gadgets or socks, but for real changes that will help families, installers and communities next year and for years to come.

Here are the presents I would love to see under the tree.

Wish 1: Close the spark gap making clean heating cheaper to run

If you only remember one phrase from this column, let it be this one: ‘the spark gap’.

The spark gap is the gap between what we pay for electricity and what we pay for gas. 

For years we have stacked levies and policy costs on to electricity while leaving gas relatively cheap. The result is that a unit of electricity can cost several times more than a unit of gas.

From a climate point of view, it makes no sense at all. We are asking people to swap a gas boiler for an electric heat pump that is around three times more efficient, then charging them a premium every time they use clean energy. It is like asking people to buy a cleaner car and then making the clean fuel the most expensive thing on the forecourt.

Installers tell me the same story again and again. The system has been designed properly. The heat pump is in. The home is warm, quiet and comfortable. Then the householder opens their bill and does not see the big saving they were hoping for. In some cases it can even be a little higher.

That is not because the heat pump is a bad bit of kit. The technology is fantastic. It is because our pricing structure is stacked against it.

My first wish is very simple. Move a big chunk of those legacy levies and policy costs off electricity and either on to general taxation or on to gas. Bring that price gap down so that electricity is clearly cheaper relative to gas.

Do that and a heat pump suddenly becomes the obvious financial choice as well as the green one. It turns a difficult decision into an easy one.

Wish 2: Stop fitting gas boilers in brand new homes

We have known for a long time that new homes should not be built with gas boilers.

When the old zero carbon homes policy was scrapped, roughly a million and a half homes missed out on higher standards. Those houses now need expensive retrofits just to catch up with where we said we would be. 

It is a painful lesson in what happens when you duck the big decisions. We must not repeat that mistake with the Future Homes Standard. Housebuilders and manufacturers are ready to move. Plenty of schemes are already being built all electric. What is missing is a firm line in the sand.

So, my second wish is this. Set an immovable date when gas boilers in new homes end and stick to it. 

No loopholes. No pretending a “hydrogen ready” gas boiler is good enough. From that date on, if you are building a new home, you fit a heat pump or you connect to a low carbon heat network.

It is far cheaper to get the fabric and heating right once than to rip open brand new homes in ten- or fifteen-years’ time. 

A clear date gives installers and apprentices years of predictable work. It gives manufacturers the confidence to invest. It gives families buying new homes certainty that they are not being sold something that will be obsolete almost as soon as they have moved in.

Wish 3: Get the big plans off the shelf and into people’s homes

We keep hearing about the Future Homes Standard. We keep hearing about the Warm Homes Plan that is meant to be the flagship retrofit programme for England. Scotland has a bold Heat in Buildings Bill that has already been pushed back. All of these are essential. All of them have drifted.

On site you can feel the hesitation. Developers wait to see what the final rules will be. Builders hold off changing details. Colleges are cautious about reshaping courses. Installers think twice about taking on apprentices while they are still guessing what the pipeline of work will look like in three years’ time.

My third wish is for government to stop trailing and start delivering. Publish the Future Homes Standard in full, with clear performance requirements and a proper start date. Publish the Warm Homes Plan with real, long-term funding, not just a short burst of money.

Clarity might not make headlines, but it is one of the best gifts government can give. 

When everyone knows where the bar is, they can get on with the job of reaching it. Families can plan their own upgrades. Firms can invest. Training providers can commit. The talk turns into real work in real homes.

Wish 4: A national skills drive for heat pumps and home retrofit

Whenever I walk onto a really well executed project there is always a craftsperson quietly holding it together.

It might be the heating engineer who has gone deep into heat pump design and knows exactly how to size and commission a system. 

It might be the electrician who thinks about the whole home, not just a row of breakers. 

It might be the joiner who understands that every junction they build affects how warm, quiet and comfortable that home will be, not just how smart it looks on day one. 

We are going to need a lot more of those people.

To upgrade millions of homes and fit hundreds of thousands of heat pumps a year, we need tens of thousands more skilled people. At the moment we do not have them, and our current training effort is nowhere near that scale.

So, my fourth wish is for a serious national skills drive. I want to see paid apprenticeships on real jobs that specialise in low carbon heating, ventilation and proper fabric upgrades. 

I want existing gas engineers to have a clear, supported route to retrain on heat pumps. 

I want colleges to be able to invest in the right kit, the right trainers and the right courses without worrying the policy will change again in two years’ time.

For young people this is a route into highly skilled, hands-on work that is not going to be automated away. 

For mid-career trades it is a way to secure their livelihoods. 

For manufacturers it is the only way we will ever have enough people to design, fit and maintain the systems we know we need.

Wish 5: New towns that live up to their promise

New towns are personal for me.

I grew up in Washington New Town near Sunderland. It was a place built with vision and generosity by a young team who genuinely believed they could shape a better life for families like mine. 

We had green spaces everywhere. We had proper neighbourhood centres. We had homes that felt modern and kind. 

For a kid from a working-class background, it was a fantastic place to grow up. Even now, when I go back at Christmas and see the lights in those streets, I am reminded what good planning and good housing can do for people’s lives.

So, when I hear talk of twelve new towns across England, my heart is in my mouth. 

This is not an abstract policy idea for me. I know exactly how powerful a good new town can be, and how long the impact lasts. 

My fifth wish is that we treat these new towns as a once in a generation chance to get it right.

That means places where you can walk to school, to the park, to the shops. Places that feel human in scale, with trees and front doors and streets that belong to people, not just cars. 

It means planning public transport from day one, not trying to bolt it on later. It is a chance to design proper neighbourhoods from scratch, not just drop another car dependent estate on the edge of a bypass.

Technically, it also means there is no excuse for fossil fuel heating. Every new town can be planned as all electric from the start. Homes can be built with proper insulation as standard. Heat pumps and heat networks can be part of the masterplan, not awkward add-ons. Roofs can be designed for solar. Streets can be laid out to stay cool in summer and sheltered in winter.

I look back at Washington New Town and I see what is possible when a country takes this seriously. I want kids growing up in the new towns we build now to feel the same pride in forty years’ time.

Wish 6: Turn planning permissions into real homes, not just paper

On my travels I see two extremes.

On the one side, communities are told they must accept hundreds of new homes and are rightly worried about the strain on schools, doctors, roads and green space. On the other side, I see empty sites with planning permission sitting untouched for years while housing waiting lists grow.

Big developers hold very large pipelines of land with permissions. Some of that is sensible planning. 

Some of it is, bluntly, land being held as an asset rather than turned into actual homes. 

Sometimes there are genuine obstacles. Infrastructure is complicated. Markets shift. But there are also cases where land with permission has become an investment product, something to sit on while its paper value goes up, rather than a place to build decent homes. 

At the same time, small builders and community groups struggle to get access to sensible plots at all.

My sixth wish is for a planning and land system that rewards building, not hoarding. 

Local authorities need the ability to say that if a site has had permission for years and no real attempt has been made to build, there will be consequences. That might be a meaningful levy on long idle sites. In the most blatant cases it might mean compulsory purchase at a fair value.

Alongside that, we should be parcelling big sites in ways that allow housing associations, community builders, self-builders and smaller firms to build alongside the big developers. That spreads risk brings variety and usually raises quality.

For communities this means that when they go through the pain of a big planning debate, they actually see homes and amenities appear, not just a fence and a sign. 

For installers it means more live sites instead of endless “future phases” that never quite start.

Wish 7: A steady, decade-long plan to fix cold homes

Most of the homes that people will be living in in 2050 already exist.

Some are in decent shape and just need a bit of help. Others are frankly shocking in a country as wealthy as ours. Cold, damp, draughty houses that are expensive to heat and bad for people’s health.

We have tried to tackle this with a string of short term schemes. They come with big launches and big acronyms, then close early or change direction just as the industry has geared up for them. Homeowners lose confidence. Installers get burned.

My final wish is for something very unflashy but absolutely vital. A boring, stable, ten-year national programme to upgrade the coldest homes in the country.

Pick a clear end point. Decide how far up the energy ladder we want every home to climb. Back it with a mix of grants for people who need help, sensible finance for those who can afford to pay over time, and local area plans that join the dots street by street.

If you keep that promise over a decade, the benefits are enormous. Families see their bills and their mould problems shrink. The NHS sees fewer illnesses linked to cold homes. Local trades get steady, predictable work. Manufacturers can invest in UK factories and know that demand will not evaporate overnight.

Most importantly, millions of people simply get to feel warmer, healthier and more secure at home.

A hopeful Christmas 

None of these wishes are about magic technology. They are about putting the basics in place.

• Make clean electricity cheaper to use. 
• Stop connecting brand new homes to fossil fuels. 
• Get the big policies off the shelf and into people’s lives. 
• Train the next generation of skilled installers. 
• Build new towns with the same ambition and generosity that shaped places like Washington. 
• Turn paper permissions into bricks and mortar. 
• Commit for the long haul to fix the coldest homes in the country.

I spend my life talking to the people who can make this happen, engineers, builders, designers, apprentices, community groups, manufacturers. The will is there. The craft is there. The kit is there. What we need now is the policy backbone to match that effort.

Next year, I will probably still be that slightly grumpy bloke on a freezing December site, banging on about insulation and boilers while everyone else is thinking about mince pies. 

But I would much rather be there on moving in day, standing with a family who know their home is ready for the future, than quietly worrying about whether they can afford to keep it warm.

That, to me, would be the best Christmas present this country could give itself.

George Clarke is a TV presenter, architect, writer and Ecodan Ambassador