The project will provide us with deeper knowledge of the support needs of newly trained installers and what role additional financial payments can play in providing that support. It will also provide insights about the training experience and the experience of moving into the heat pump sector, an area on which there is currently little knowledge.

A need for heat pump installers

If we are to meet current net zero goals, we need the low-carbon heating industry to grow. To achieve this growth, we need about 27,000 new heat pump installers to join by 2028. Increasing numbers by this amount is a huge challenge, as it entails training more engineers per year than there are presently in the whole heat pump industry.

A number of new routes to training have opened up in recent months, particularly for experienced heating engineers currently working in gas and oil. Large energy firms are moving into the sector and training their own installers, as are umbrella schemes. Sole traders, microbusinesses and their employees have been given access to training too. This is mostly funded by the UK government but the devolved nations and many local governments are offering schemes too. Under the majority, short courses of around one week are offered that address the technical aspects of heat pump installation.

The barriers to entering a new sector

But is training on its own enough? In our own work with fossil fuel installers, we found that a lack of technical skills is only one of the barriers discouraging them from working with heat pumps. For those who undertake training outside the support network of a large firm or umbrella scheme, there is a risk that the challenges generated by those barriers outweigh the opportunity that working with heat pumps offers. This is particularly the case for plumbers and gas boiler engineers whose existing skills are in high demand and who already have an established customer base. In spite of having undertaken the training, immediate commercial pressures might reduce motivation or risk generating inertia that results in those trained in valuable heat pump skills not making use of those skills.

Surrey County Council have commissioned East Surrey College to offer a small number of funded heat pump training places. We’ve partnered with the council to work on a study with two aims. The first is simply to interview course participants about their aspirations that led them to join the course and their intended pathway to putting that learning into practice. The second is to study the effect of relatively small but meaningful, financial payments on the likelihood of those trainees actually moving into fitting heat pumps in homes.

Interviews will be incredibly useful in their own right. There is relatively little knowledge on the barriers and motivations of tradespeople in the plumbing and heating sector, a problem made particularly acute by the fact that so many work independently. The BEIS Heating and cooling installer study is one of the few comprehensive studies of installer sentiment and is helpful in this regard. We’ll be writing up and publishing the findings from our interviews to add to knowledge in the domain as well as using the findings to develop future innovation projects.

The study of financial payments will be extremely valuable too. We are looking into two models of delivery that address challenges we’ve identified in our earlier research. Each will be worth around £1,000 to the participant or their employer, and we will randomly allocate participants to one or the other of the delivery modes.

The first is a bursary scheme that gives newly trained heating engineers access to funds that cover the costs of related activities necessary to progress in the sector. For example, participants might use the money to pay MCS registration fees, do further training, or advertise their new heat pump offer in their local area.

The second is an additional payment for heat pump installations undertaken in the first few months of work in the area to cover the increased administrative costs that heat pump installations have over gas boilers. This is intended to cover the time and effort of doing some of this work as engineers become accustomed to these new processes.

A bonus scheme will also operate in addition to the above two pathways that will financially reward installers who manage a certain number of retrofit installations over the lifetime of the project.

The project began with training delivery in February and March 2023. We’ll be conducting interviews with the participants shortly after their training and will publish insights from them soon after. The participants will then be given the space to develop their work in heat pump home retrofit while making use of the funding available. The funding period will end in December 2023 at which time we’ll invite the participants for a second round of interviews to find out more on their experience over the intervening months. These interview insights alongside reflections on the financial payment schemes being studied will be published in January 2024.