The Return of the ‘Boiler Tax’
Households are facing the threat of a new £40 ‘boiler tax’ as Labour consults on plans to raise heat pump targets for manufacturers – despite waning demand from consumers. The Telegraph has more.
Targets will be ramped up to as high as 10% of boiler sales under proposals by Ed Miliband, who resurrected the controversial scheme last month despite fears it would push up the price of gas boilers.
The Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM) threatens fines of up to £500 for each heat pump manufacturers failed to sell below a government-set target, currently at 6%.
Analysis of installation figures in the past 12 months shows demand is “flatlining”, threatening the Energy Secretary’s ambition of seeing 600,000 heat pumps fitted every year from 2028.
Experts said the price of a typical gas boiler would rise by £40 as a result of the penalties.
Monthly installations of air-source heat pumps have fluctuated between 4,000 and 5,800 in the 12 months to April, according to MCS, the installers’ accreditation body.
The Energy Department maintains installations have risen by a quarter since last year, but Mike Foster, of the Energy and Utilities Alliance lobby group, said “the trend line, which averages out the 12 months but also suggests in which direction the level of installs is going, is flatlining”.
He added: “The Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM), which spawned the ‘boiler tax’, is a bad policy. Always was and always will be. It does nothing to stimulate demand for heat pumps, which is what is lacking.
“Appliance manufacturers will make products that sell, that’s just basic commerce. Fining British businesses because consumers don’t want a product they make is simply nonsense, and nothing changes that.
“It’s like fining the local butcher because people aren’t eating enough greens.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
OK, so then basically the choice is between
(a) paying extra £40 for a gas boiler that works well and keeps your house warm, or
(b) buying a bulky, noisy inefficient piece of kit that does not heat your house properly and triples your electricity bills.
Hmm, that’s a tough one…!
And the planet will thank you for your £40 donation to save it! What’s not to like?!
The target for the number of heat pumps manufacturers have to sell will creep up, in the same way minimum EV sales are creeping up, and before long the cost of a new gas boiler will be hundreds of pounds more and rising.
If the lemmings won’t jump off the cliff by themselves, you have to push them.
Markets are controlled by price. The more something costs, the less/fewer are bought.
Sales of gas boilers will fall as prices go up but sales of heat pumps will not go up, because people cannot buy what they cannot afford.
Instead gas boilers will be repaired/reconditioned. Somebody will make a business out of this.
Likely heat pump sales are driven by construction companies buying them for new-build, rather than conversions from gas. Maybe some conversions from night storage radiators – which are useless – where heat pumps may have some advantage.
Okay, I’d still choose the additional hundreds they may charge – worth every penny eventually!
just another cash racket by the Marxists
Cheaper to pay the “fine” amortised over the lifetime of the boiler which has lower purchase and installation cost and running costs.
Cadent is busy renewing all the gas pipes to my entire road. I imagine they think the investment is worthwhile…
I expect they expect the Net Zero policy will soon be “reformed”… geddit?
Buy a new gas boiler now and keep it in its box in the garage to wait for that rainy day.
I agree though ‘they’ have probably thought of that and will ban such installations. The result of that will mean more non-regulated installations (and repairs).
It’s like watching some increasingly implausible disaster movie while standing in a cold dark unemployment office tearing up 50 pound notes.
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
“We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”
Richard Feynman
Ah. Clearly a neo-Nazi. /s
This is such a bonkers policy in a supposedly free enterprise economy that only a socialist could have invented it. Oh wait – it was the Conservative Party.
Yep. Socialists.
Heat pumps are ugly, bulky, noisy and inefficient, like so many of our politicians.
Green has only ever been about COERCION. —-It is all about government deciding, based on their phony planet saving agenda all emanating from the UN how we should all live our lives and generally this means having a much lower standard of living because the UN/WEF says our lifestyles are “unsustainable”. ——According to these technocrats that we mostly never heard of and never voted for, we in the prosperous west have too much of everything and should make do with much LESS. The excuse they use for this is “climate change”, the excuse that just keeps giving for the Socialist World Government people.
All these zealots are f’ing mad.