UK Apartment Owners Are Getting Locked Out of Money-Saving Green Tech

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Information on how often freeholders reject installation requests is limited. But UK apartments are lagging houses in terms of installation rates. Some 3% of buildings in England containing apartments have rooftop solar panels installed, compared to 7% of houses, according to government figures, while five times as many houses have heat pumps.

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“If we all had electric cars and solar panels and a battery, the cost-of-living crisis would already be over,” says Adam Bell, a partner at consultancy Stonehaven who focuses on energy. For a typical household spending around £1,600 a year on home energy and £1,200 on a gas car, going electric could save about £1,500, he says.

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Younger homeowners are also often more open to clean-energy tech than their older counterparts, according to Nesta, a UK-based nonprofit that researches the energy transition. 

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If this segment of the population is held back from installations, “it’s going to be very difficult for the government to meet targets, which would help them to meet their legally binding carbon budgets,” says Katy King, a director at Nesta. Many leaseholders don’t realize that their rights are so restricted, she adds. 

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Freeholders — who may be individuals, corporations, public bodies, investors or pension funds — are required to accept “reasonable” requests from leaseholders for building modifications, but the regulations don’t define the term clearly, King says. Many freeholders are unfamiliar with green technology and some are concerned about what could go wrong, King has found when conducting focus groups. In addition, freeholders generally don’t see the savings or other benefits of an installation.

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Freeholders who do approve heat pumps and other tech sometimes charge leaseholders additional fees for this permission, says King. Apartment owners also have to comply with stringent rules on unit size, noise and placement.

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Return on Investment

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As the UK government continues to encourage a move away from fossil fuels, leaseholders are worried about being left behind, and what that would mean for their finances. Sam Mangham, a 39-year-old academic, owns a leasehold ground-floor flat in Southampton on England’s south coast. He first sought permission to install a heat pump more than two years ago, but the management company responsible for maintaining the building said they didn’t know enough about the technology to allow him to proceed. 

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A recent home survey suggested his boiler will soon give out. “We’re definitely concerned that our boiler will fail and we’ll have to replace it with another gas boiler, given the pending phase-out,” he says. “We don’t want to spend money on something that’ll be more expensive to run and become increasingly hard to maintain.”

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In European countries such as Germany, “balcony solar” — portable panels that can plug into a wall socket — has become a popular way for renters and other apartment-dwellers to subsidize their energy bills. The UK government plans to allow the sale of similar units.

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But many renters and leaseholders probably have no legal right to install a panel or heat pump on their balcony and those who do may still face additional fees, according to the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, a charity offering help and advice to leaseholders. 

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Allume Energy, a company that specializes in installing solar panels in blocks of flats that split the energy input between multiple electricity meters, has so far been targeting subsidized homes run by UK local government or housing associations, but is aiming to expand into privately-owned blocks of flats over the next year. Its customers typically spend between £2,500 and £4,500 per flat and save up to £600 a year, the company says.