Miliband Accused of Pitting “Neighbours Against Neighbours” After Scrapping Heat Pump Rule
Ed Miliband is under fire for scrapping a planning rule designed to curb heat pump noise. The Telegraph has more.
Homeowners switching to a heat pump will no longer have to acquire planning permission to install the technology at least one metre away from a neighbouring property, under relaxed measures announced on Thursday.
Critics said the decision to scrap the requirement, originally introduced to mitigate noise pollution, was simply “another quick fix” to inflate heat pump uptake figures amid weak demand for the green technology.
Andrew Montford, of Net Zero Watch, said: “Heat pumps are clearly a mistake. They are expensive to install and expensive to run, and now it seems they are going to set neighbour against neighbour too. It’s hard to identify any redeeming features at all.”
In 2023, the previous government announced that the “arbitrary” one-metre rule would be scrapped after developers complained it was too challenging to implement.
Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, is spearheading the mass adoption of heat pumps and has a target of fitting 600,000 a year in Britain by 2028. In the past 12 months, only 65,600 have been installed, according to MCS, the certification body. …
Local authorities are said to be bracing for a rise in noise complaints as Labour pushes ahead with the heat pump rollout.
To encourage demand, ministers are doubling next year’s funding for a heat pump subsidies scheme that allows families to claim up to £7,500 towards the cost of a new unit.
A report last year from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that local planning authorities “would not have the capacity to cope with the increase in planning applications and noise complaints” as the heat pump rollout expands to built-up areas.
It found that one in four people living near a heat pump found the noise to be intrusive, with complaints “usually centred around disturbed sleep”.
Worth reading in full.
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So that’s another £7.5Billion annual black hole that Labour has managed to dig for us, then. And Starmer has the effrontery to claim that it’s all the fault of Nigel, and that we can’t trust Reform, when he’s managed to wreck the British economy big time, all in less than a year. Trust him? That’s surely the biggest joke by a politician of all time! His fatuous sermon today was utterly ridiculous, so why the hell didn’t anyone call him out and publicly ridicule him? The one thing they can’t stand is being laughed at – now it really is time to do just that.
But, but he was being serious – you can tell because he had rolled his shirt sleeves up.
600,000 heat pump subsidies a year would cost the government £450,000,000 a year. £7.5billion would be the total cost of subsidies if everyone got a grant to install a heat pump. Given that most people realise heat pumps are useless in older, less well insulated homes, this bribe is unlikely to result in a massive increase in uptake so the actual cost to the taxpayer will be fairly small.
Yes, a slip of the calculator there, I’m afraid, sorry about that! But as you say, there’s always those ‘hidden extras’ that Them in Charge are so prone to forget to mention to us Plebs. It’s so simple to mislead the innocent buyers by quoting to them the up-front costs.
But then, it is also oh so easy to somehow forget to mention those inconvenient downstream costs hidden away in hype and misdirection. They keep on coming, all the way down as far as the end-of-life disposal costs, both financial and environmental?
I wonder what the actual all-in costs of this hopelessly absurd obsession with alternative so-called ‘renewables’ really are? That could be useful information that Reform UK might find useful, in balancing their books to cover the costs of their own supposed ‘financial Black Hole’, should they replace Keir the Obscure in the very near future.
The “one meter rule” is useless, anyway, because one local homeowner lodged a complaint against his nearest neighbour’s heat pump 300 yards away, because the noise was unending and unbearable for him and his family, in what was previously a peaceful rural idyll.
Same effect with the windmills.
I would have that a good reason for having a heat pump was that it will provide cheap heat. Being able to put it closer to a neighbours house is not a good incentive considering the reason there is poor uptake is because heat pumps are not that good.
Wr have one at work and it’s f# king noisy- if my neighbour 3 feet away had one it would drive me to bite his ankles.
Luckily at home my nearest neighbours are nearly half a mile away so it’s not a major problem.
Can you not just cock a leg on it and short it out?
I wish I’d thought of that – sound idea!
Surely a pair of (insulated) pliers would work?
Whut? On the neighbour? Ooh nasty!
Shove a stick in the fan would be better.
Train a dog to do it!
Like Ezra Pound said, Usura rusteth the chisel. It rusteth the craft and the craftsman. It gnaweth the thread in the loom. None learneth to weave gold in her pattern.
Thanks for that.
He is such a Git
1,2,3,10m distance will not make any difference. They are noisy. The fans cause vibrations in the air which carry a long way.
Ed Millibrain still won’t accept that people don’t want them because they are not cost efficient, do not provide enough heat output, require installation of a copper cylinder and immersion heater – assuming there is space – and installation for most people will be unaffordable notwithstanding the £7 500 once new rads, pipework and insulation is taken into account.
Now that Reform UK has promised to nix Net Zero (and the whole project is collapsing round the world) most people and businesses will just sit tight for the next few years.
Who cares about disturbed sleep. We must support Ed’s lunatic ideology or we’ll all die – apparently!