At last week's Westminster City Council meeting, Cllr Ed Pitt Ford (Pimlico North) explained the importance of choosing the right domestic heating systems within Pimlico and why this matters for current residents and generations to come.
Watch Cllr Pitt Ford's speech above and read his comments below.
Thank you, Lord Mayor. PDHU, the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking, was incredible when it started. 70 years ago, it was futuristic. Recycling waste heat from Battersea Power Station, brilliant. Residents got affordable warmth and hot water in a way the rest of the country hadn't even imagined.
But fast-forward to today and the system is showing its age. Pipes burst, heat disappears in transit, and residents are paying over the odds for something they cannot control.
And that isn't fair.
It's not fair for the tenants whose flats get flooded, it's not fair on residents who pay over the odds for their heating, and it certainly isn't fair on those who are injured or live in fear of the next catastrophic leak in their home. PDHU was designed like the coal-fired grid of its day: centralised, one-directional, and fossil-fueled. Big source, big pipes, passive consumers at the end.
Now look at our electricity system. Distributed, smart, flexible, rooftop solar, wind farms, batteries, even EVs feeding back into the grid.
Cleaner, more reliable, and most importantly, it puts choice in people's hands. That's exactly what we should be aiming for.
So what do we do? We decentralise. Not by ripping out everything blindly, but by matching the right solution to each building in a phased transition.
We allow people to play an active role in the electricity market to get the best pricing. When it is very windy, they can be paid to heat their homes. For some homes, the solution is small electric combi boilers. Simple, reliable, efficient. Residents can control them. As no hot water is stored, no energy is wasted. They're affordable now and as our grid decarbonises, they get automatically cleaner over time. In other blocks, air source heat pumps make sense. Sometimes at building level, sometimes flat level. It depends on the space and the layout. These put less pressure on the electricity grid.
And in a world of increasingly hot summers, it can be run in reverse to provide cooling.
The key is flexibility. Each home, each block, each resident is different. One size fits all doesn't work.
And here's the principle: the state shouldn't be telling people how to heat their homes.
Our role is to enable, not dictate, to provide options, support, and guidance, but not to force one solution on everyone.
So what am I asking for tonight? We have called in the cabinet member decision and I would ask the members sat on the Scrutiny Committee to run this by cabinet again. The previous information requests by that committee haven't been fulfilled, so the decision was impossible to scrutinise. Councillor MacAlister was rightly challenging officers on their reluctance to share details with residents and it is equally concerning when the details will not be shared with councillors.
I've asked for the financial model many times and it has not been shared.
Rachel Blake has said that leaseholders deserve transparency. Let's see that.
I also ask cabinet to dig deeper in their questioning. A projected average cost of more than £50,000 per home should be ringing alarm bells and not be an approval you want to be associated with. It will force people to take on more debt than they can afford.
I spoke to a resident leaseholder in her late 70s who cannot afford, on her pension, to pay additional debt repayments to the council to cover these huge costs. It is completely fair that whilst assessing what she would need for later life, that it didn't include a £50,000 boiler.
We still haven't had a good answer on why upgrading the electricity supply needs to cost over £70 million, and whether it will need doing regardless of the solution selected.
Councillor Barraclough was asking the right questions at the cabinet meeting.
Why are we not getting economies of scale?
Why is it so much more expensive than you or I would pay?
Picture Pimlico in 10 years. Warm homes, reliable heat, residents in control, carbon emissions falling. Not a centralised relic harking back to the 1950s, not a system imposed from above, £185 million not ripped out of the local economy. A range of smart, local, efficient solutions delivering better service at lower cost. PDHU was bold in its day.
Let's be just as bold now, using all the technology available to us to electrify and decentralise heating, to make consumers active, and to introduce cooling, creating a modern, distributed, resident-first solution that Westminster can be proud of.
Thank you, Lord Mayor.
