The 2025 Turning Point for ECO4.
Late November 2025 marked a dramatic shift for ECO4. In the 2025 United Kingdom budget, the government announced it would be scrapping the ECO scheme altogether.
The decision is part of a move to cut “green levies” on energy bills and shift their cost to general taxation, a change aimed at reducing household bills by around £150 per year from April 2026. According to industry commentary, this marks the end of what was described as “the UK’s biggest insulation programme for households.”
ECO4 & Great British Insulation Scheme (GBIS): Where Things Were Before the Cut.
To appreciate the impact of the cancellation, it’s worth recapping what ECO4 (and GBIS) offered:
ECO4 — launched in 2022 — was the latest iteration of the long-running supplier obligation scheme requiring major energy providers to subsidise (not government cash) energy-efficiency and heating measures in eligible homes (insulation, boilers, heat pumps, etc.).
The scheme was backed by a £4 billion budget over its lifetime.
GBIS, which launched in March 2023 as a companion scheme, added roughly £1 billion to reach less efficient households that might not qualify under ECO4’s criteria, focusing primarily on insulation.
As of mid-2025, ECO4 had delivered hundreds of thousands of measures: the government counted about 875,900 measures across 260,400 households by June 2025.
In sum — by 2025 ECO4 + GBIS were already the biggest coordinated home-efficiency effort the UK had run.
Why the Government Scrapped ECO4, and What It Means!
Reasoning Behind the Cut.
The 2025 budget seeks to reduce household energy bills immediately by lowering the levy burden on energy bills. Scrapping ECO was part of that.
Rather than obliging energy suppliers to deliver upgrades, the government suggests that support will now come via a different umbrella (for example, through wider funding pools)
What This Means for Homeowners and What to Do Now.
If you were planning to access ECO4 or GBIS support — now is the time to act. With the scheme scrapped, eligibility might end soon.
If the new “warm homes” support replaces ECO, waiting could mean missing out; the design and eligibility criteria remain uncertain.
For homeowners and landlords, this could signal a shift: greater responsibility on individuals (or taxpayers broadly) rather than energy suppliers.
From a carbon and net-zero standpoint, ditching a large retrofit scheme could slow progress, unless replaced with equally robust and well-funded alternatives.
What This Means for Installers, Assessors, and Retrofit Coordinators.
The end of ECO4 places the entire retrofit workforce in a difficult and uncertain position. For more than a decade, the ECO framework has underpinned the livelihoods of thousands of newly trained installers, retrofit assessors, and coordinators. With funding now withdrawn, many within the supply chain are left hanging in the balance.
The industry has always been something of a patchwork — teams travelling the length of the country to meet demand, subcontractors moving from one obligation period to the next, and companies scaling up or down with every policy announcement. It hasn’t always been efficient, and it hasn’t always been very “ECO-friendly,” but it has supported a large workforce that now faces a sudden reduction in available work.
While government schemes come and go, this cancellation feels different. The public has been promised lower energy bills as a result of scrapping the levy-funded system, which may reduce the urgency or concern around lost retrofit capacity. In other words: the savings will be visible to bill payers, not the installers who delivered the work.
Energy suppliers have historically “paid” for ECO, but in reality the funding has always come from household bills rather than central government. With the obligation removed, the financial burden lifts from suppliers — but so too does the demand that kept the retrofit market alive.
What happens next will depend heavily on the government’s replacement plans, if any, and whether a new national energy-efficiency programme emerges. Until then, installers, assessors, and coordinators face a challenging transition period through 2026 and beyond, potentially marked by job losses, consolidation, and a shift toward privately funded upgrades or alternative schemes
