21 October 2024
Britons don’t want to dump their gas boilers. Photo Mick Sinclair / Alamy Stock Photo.
The Labour government is planning to bring back a previous Conservative policy designed to accelerate the take up of heat pumps but dropped in the face of consumer aversion and realisation of its shortcomings.
That hasn’t deterred the new government, which is attracted to anything that carries a “net zero” label, no matter how impractical. And it ignores warnings from trade unions – GMB in particular has long pointed out the flaws in a ban on gas boilers.
The scheme, known as the “Clean Heat Market Mechanism” but commonly referred to as the “gas boiler tax”, was intended to begin in 2024. It was claimed that a 4 per cent tax on fossil fuel boiler manufacturers would prompt them to increase sales of ground and air heat source pumps. The manufacturers responded by simply adding, on average, £120 to the cost of a new gas boiler.
Abandoned
The idea was quickly abandoned by the Conservative government as ludicrous, and shelved until 2035. The reasons aren’t hard to grasp as it came down to penalising manufacturers for not selling what people did not want to buy.
Heat source pumps are unsuited to much of Britain’s ageing housing stock – or else require extensive adaptation work. The tax would have made heating the home more expensive for people wanting a new system. And it would oblige many with older and less efficient systems to cling on to them for longer.
Backlash
Unconcerned about the backlash the scheme faced when first launched, the energy secretary Ed Miliband has indicated that the scheme will be rolled out again in April 2025. Former energy secretary Claire Coutinho said in the Daily Telegraph on 21 September “…I scrapped this policy because I felt it needed to be reconsidered. It’s a policy catering more to the green lobby and vested interests than to consumers.”
According to boiler manufacturers, about 1.5 million new gas boilers are installed each year. About a quarter of these are typically in pensioner households. They now face a double hit of increased heating costs as well as losing their winter heating allowance.
As with other energy polices, the boiler tax isn’t turning out to be a break from the past by a Labour government, but is reviving the abandoned ideas of its predecessors.