The UK imposes social and environmental levies of 23% on electricity, but less than 2% on gas. These levies are actively working against the decarbonisation of heat in the UK. Government needs to migrate the levies from electricity to gas to allow people to run heat pumps with a financial advantage. As things stand, it is cheaper, in many instances, to use polluting fossil fuels. Improving the financial case for homeowners and landlords to adopt heat pump technologies will mitigate against climate change, improve urban air-quality, and will encourage the long-term supply chain for heat pumps. Using heat pumps to harvest on-shore thermal resources reduces fossil fuel imports, so contributing to both fuel security and to the UK’s balance of payments.
The UK cannot hope to achieve 600,000 heat pump installations a year by 2028 until it reduces the artificially inflated cost of increasingly clean electricity. To support the case, sign the petition by clicking on the link and adding your signature: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/588159 and please do share widely to encourage as many signatures as possible.
