Friday, February 23, 2024

UK
Matthew Vallender: Driving consumers towards heat pumps should be a Conservative priority

February 21, 2024

Cllr Matthew Vallender is a Swindon Councillor

Prior to the early 2020s, when debate has become focused on the seemingly impossible task of generating growth in the UK, in 2010 the then-shadow chancellor George Osborne set out his ‘New Economic Model’.

The model was built on promoting long-term saving and investment, shaped not just by support to increase exports or even welfare reform, but to invest directly in green technology. He recognised that not only was this about restarting the UK economy after the Great Recession, but also about ‘not burdening the future to pay for today’.

Thirteen years after that speech, there is no greater, more rewarding task for this Government to undertake than to drive forward with reforms on how Britons heat their homes. Specifically, that means transitioning from old gas boilers (the sale of which will be banned from 2035) to innovative heat pumps, home-grown here in the UK.

The Conservative case for heat pumps is strong. British homes remain the oldest and leakiest in Europe. They cool three times faster than houses in comparator countries like Norway and Germany. As fuel poverty continues to grow in this country, subsidies for domestic energy have now become widely accepted as suitable levels of government intervention despite the £25 billion bill in 2023. In the same year, 55.8 per cent of the population was in fuel poverty (spending more than 10 per cent of household income on energy).

The merits of promoting heat pumps as the valid, logical alternative to gas boilers are two-fold: the moral argument of creating warmer, more liveable homes for Britons at a cheaper price, while also providing the green growth Osborne articulated over a decade ago, but which has yet to be fully realised.

The Government has a key role to play in promoting uptake and actively supporting the private sector to deliver a consumer-led shift. It is fighting an uphill battle. Currently, in the UK, there are 564 heat pumps per 100,000 households, while in Norway the ratio is one heat pump per 3.4 people. Polling in The Times showed that 68 per cent of people do not plan to get a heat pump in the next five years.

The Conservative response to consumer inertia should be three-fold.

Firstly, the Government needs to drive an information campaign, that clarifies the benefits of heat pumps, explains how they work, and sets out which properties can benefit from them. This has worked well in Scotland where the funding and information campaign are delivered in tandem. In one year, they have driven a three-fold increase in the number of heat pumps installed domestically.

In 2023, the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero highlighted the lack of trusted voices and narratives while public engagement and trust remains low. This must change to meet the current target of 600,000 heat pumps installed per year.

Secondly, the Government needs to safeguard domestic production, which can act as a significant boost for the Union, by clarifying its policy. Octopus Energy, one of the largest energy companies in the UK, has already commenced manufacturing heat pumps in Northern Ireland, a significant boost for their economy.

However, manufacturing companies, like Vaillant, have highlighted the need for the Government to deliver a stable energy policy, an attractive tax regime, and more developed incentives for training so that Government can facilitate the private sector growth needed to deliver on targets. From zero VAT of all installation costs to a larger training grant that covers the paid leave needed to undertake the learning, these small changes could deliver massive reform to a sector that is having to balance the challenge of unconfident consumers.

Finally, the Government should form a trade board with key industry partners who can advise and facilitate policymakers. We need to shift away from a “Government knows best” approach and recognise, again, that growth comes from enabling the private sector to deliver its aims, not adding additional bureaucracy which further hinders enterprise.

As with Cameron and Osborne’s new grant scheme for electric vehicles in 2011, which opened the door to EVs becoming more normalised in society, we need big bang-style policy measures that will deliver meaningful societal change. The children who now grow up in cleaner air as a result of that measure will now thank us for a warmer home in the future.

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