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Two years ago, the Tories triggered a furious response after announcing plans to ban gas boilers and force households to replace them with costly heat pumps instead.
Heat pumps can cost anything up to £18,000 to install, which is 12 times the average £1,500 charge for fitting a new gas boiler. Yet Conservative ministers were calling 600,000 pumps installed every year by 2028.
The Government’s infrastructure chief Sir John Armitt warned of widespread resistance to the plans and said the only way to make the plan work was to force households to switch by banning gas boilers.
Readers reacted with anger and disbelief at his proposal. Political realities struck and the Tories pulled the plug.
Incredibly, new Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is expected to revive the policy from April.
Miliband won’t directly force households to rip out their boilers and install heat pumps. Even he wouldn’t go that far. At least, I hope he won’t.
Instead, he’s turning up the heat on boiler makers by forcing them to make more gas pumps – even if nobody wants to buy them.
Ultimately, consumers will pay the price.
Under his plan, boiler manufacturers will face open-ended fines if they fail to make the Miliband-mandated correct number of heat pumps every year.
It’s a disaster in the making.
Manufacturers are warning they will have to hike the price of boilers people do want to buy, to cover the cost of making those they don’t.
This could easily add £180 to the cost of an extra gas boiler.
Households won’t be happy with paying that, especially pensioners who’ve just lost their Winter Fuel Payment and face a 10% hike in gas and electricity charges from October.
Energy department officials have privately told the industry that the scheme will definitely be introduced next year, according to The Daily Telegraph.
The Tories backtracked but as I wrote on Friday, Miliband is a man on a mission, A Clean Energy Superpower Mission, in his own words.
He won’t want to backtrack. This is his life’s work.
When people point out the flaws in Miliband’s plans to save the planet (and there are plenty), he dismisses them as Nimbys or obstructionists, and pledges to roll over them.
The green lobby will love the boiler tax but voters will hate it.
Under Tory plans inherited by Miliband, boiler makers would have to make sure that heat pumps form at least 6% of their total sales.
How are they going to do that? By forcing customers to buy them?
They might have to, given that they would be fined £3,000 for every missed sale. The only way they can cover that is by hiking the cost of gas boilers, that people do want to buy.
Some 26million households have gas boilers. Of those, around 1.5million a year install a new boiler. That’s a lot of potentially unhappy voters.
Climate change is a real threat and our homes are responsible for a fifth greenhouse gas emissions in the UK.
But like many Labour policies, the boiler tax could backfire as people decide they can’t afford to upgrade and stick with their old, less efficient boiler.
That way they’ll use more energy, rather than less.
If Miliband presses on, this could make the row over axing the Winter Fuel Payment look like a sideshow.
Heat pumps aren’t just expensive to install, they simply aren’t suitable for millions of homes.
If Labour thinks it’s unpopular now, just wait until Miliband really gets to work.