A Monopoly: Empowering MCS Could Be A Fatal Flaw in Clean Heat Policy
Something big just happened in UK retrofit and I'm not sure people paid too much attention.
The government has now officially rubber-stamped MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme) as the sole certifier of heat pumps and clean heat technologies installed using public money under schemes like the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), ECO4, and the Warm Homes funds. It’s all laid out in this government response to consultation, October 2025.
If you believe the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ), this is all about simplicity and clarity for consumers.
But let’s be clear: this wasn’t a technical judgement; it was a political one. And it may prove more reckless than it seems.
What the Public Said and What Was Ignored
Of the 248 responses submitted on the proposal:
- 172 said "No" to making MCS the sole scheme
- Only 62 said "Yes"
They weren’t all angry outliers. These were installers, professionals, experts, and scheme participants, the sort of people you’d normally listen to when shaping a sector worth billions.
But not this time. The government has decided. The rest is footnotes.
The Official Story: Simplicity and Safety
DESNZ claims mandating one scheme:
- Simplifies consumer choice
- Prevents competing certification schemes from cutting corners
- Provides a single body to oversee quality and consistency
They promise some checks and balances: a government observer on the MCS board, an annual oversight report, maybe a memorandum of understanding. All non-statutory, all after the fact.
But the decision seems less about protecting consumers and more about protecting the government from embarrassment as it scrambles for delivery systems to prop up a contested net zero timeline.
The Unofficial Story: Why Did This Really Happen?
This is where we need to ask harder, more uncomfortable questions.
1. Is it about cost?
MCS is private, self-funded, and self-governed. DESNZ doesn’t have to put it on the books. No subsidy, no oversight infrastructure, no parliamentary scrutiny baked into the system. That’s convenient in a government scraping for pennies.
2. Is government outsourcing failure?
Putting a publicly crucial system behind a private wall means when it breaks, as systems run under pressure tend to do, ministers can point and shrug. "We trusted industry, and they let you down." Sounds familiar?
3. Is this designed to fail quietly?
Put differently: is this policy less about making clean heat work, and more about ensuring that government isn’t blamed when it doesn’t?
Make it look neat, hand it over, wash your hands.
A System Built to Fail
MCS itself is not the problem. It does have competent teams, good people, and a track record of trying to standardise something complex. The problem is what government has chosen to do with it.
By mandating a private scheme as sole gatekeeper - with no statutory duties, no operational transparency, and no alternative pathways; the government has built a bottleneck that could:
- Block innovation
- Choke installer growth
- Limit consumer experience
- Amplify risk, not reduce it
And because the decision was driven more by political convenience than by systemic resilience, the system will break quietly and slowly, while the underlying goals fail to materialise.
What Choice Do We Have?
There are better models, some staring us right in the face:
- A… regulated MCS, on par with Gas Safe
- UKAS-recognised alternative schemes with controlled competition
- Statutory oversight rather than convenience clauses
- Decentralised standards, shared protocols, live data, measurable accountability
Innovation thrives in sunlight, not shadow.
The Retrofit Sector Deserves Better Than a Convenience Monopoly
We don’t need simplicity at the expense of resilience. We don’t need efficiency at the expense of trust. And we definitely don’t need to be cheering on a system that might already be engineered to take the blame.
Retrofitting the nation is hard. Delivering clean heat at scale is hard. But building brittle systems with loopholes isn’t bravery. It's a fizzing time bomb - one we already experienced with ECO 4.
The retrofit sector is not a testbed for plausible deniability. Again.