Heat pumps are becoming a plague on all our houses

Mar 21, 2023

As manufacturers turn against the Government's target, once again it will be the British public who suffer

Has there ever been a form of mis-government in modern times which will prove so disastrous, reaching into almost every home in Britain, as the Government's attempt to force heat pumps on us? I ask, not because a heat pump, if properly installed, cannot be an effective way of heating a home but because ministers still seem blithely unaware of the financial pain they are about to inflict on millions of households – and manufacturing industry, too.

The Government's plans for net zero involve a target to switch 600,000 homes a year to heat pumps by 2028 – half of which, apparently, are going to be made in Britain, creating wonderful, well-paid "green jobs". If the Government is going to set such an ambitious target, you might expect it would start by securing the support of UK heat pump manufacturers. Not a bit of it. Boiler and heat pump manufacturer Valliant has just warned that it could halt investment in Britain if the Government ploughs ahead with a threat to fine heating companies heavily if they fail to fulfil set targets for heat pumps. Every "missing" heat pump will cost them a penalty of £5,000.

If the Government cannot keep a company which has just invested £4 million in a heat pump manufacturing facility in Derbyshire on side, then who will it enlist to fulfil its policy? The truth is that the campaign to force heat pumps on us is failing not because of lazy boiler manufacturers who are stuck in their ways, but because heat pumps are not selling themselves to homeowners. At £10,000 for a small home, they are just too expensive, and there are too many misery tales of people who shelled out many thousands of pounds only to find themselves with a device which doesn't always succeed in keeping them warm.

The total number of heat pumps fitted in the past three months is fewer than 9,000 – and that is in spite of a subsidy scheme which pays bungs of £5,000 a time to homeowners who install one. Somehow, manufacturers and installers are going to have to increase installations tenfold if the target is to be met – and they are going to have to do so without the subsidies. There is, surely, no way that the public purse is going to stretch to a £5,000 handout for all of Britain's 27 million households – that would cost over £100 billion. The current subsidy scheme involves enough money only for 30,000 households to take advantage.

Unless there is a miracle advance in technology in the next few years which brings down the cost of heat pumps sharply – and there is no sign of that yet – the government is going to miss its target for 600,000 new heat pumps a year by a massive margin. The government will virtually have to send the heavies round to our houses, who then march us to the cashpoint to empty our bank accounts, in order to ensure we install them.

And no, they won't even be British-made heat pumps – not if the government's green policy is perversely going to stop companies investing in Britain. The only "green jobs" this disastrous project will create are overpaid officials in quangos who are paid to come up with ever dafter ideas of how to punish and manipulate the public into achieving net zero.

Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)