Voters Don’t Want To Pay For Green Levies
By Paul Homewood
Meanwhile in that other poll!
MINISTERS are facing a furious backlash over "green taxes" with a poll revealing that seven in 10 people want them removed from their energy bills.
As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, a Techne UK poll for Express.co.uk has revealed 69 percent want the green levy removed from their energy bills to cut the price of heating their home and electricity. The findings have been seized on by Tory backbench MPs who have been urging Boris Johnson to pull back from his Net Zero commitments on the climate change agenda.
Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison said: “I agree! Would be willing to accept even a temporary cut – say 12 months – whilst bills are so painfully high.”
North West Leicestershire MP Andrew Bridgen added: “I and many others were proposing that the Green Levy should have been cut or suspended in the Spring Statement.
“There is never a bad time to do the right thing so it should be cut now, the Government knows it has to do more to help.
“With the cost of living crisis and the cost of energy is a huge part of that.”
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Off topic and apologies for that. Many thanks to you Paul for your excellent research. I am hunting for good references to the pledge that the likes of bbc, guardian, bloomberg, cnn, forbes, independent, reuters etc have jointly made re no-platforming of climate scepticism. I am hoping some good reader here might be able to help. Many thanks in advance.
You could probably just ask them directly and they will fall over themselves to virtue signal. Say you are a global warming activist. Probably not a good time today as they will all be in floods of tears that Twitter will no longer be controlled by WEF fascists.
Net zero is a very stupid idea.
Cutting taxes is a very good idea.
Unless these sensible MPs are on Carrie Antoinette’s Christmas card list their comments will be ignored
“Voters Don’t Want To Pay For Green Levies”
and
“Voters want Green taxes on energy bills scrapped….”
…are two different things.
Green levies must be scrapped, not simply transferred from (electricity) energy bills onto general taxation.
It’s vital that consumers be reminded with every monthly bill, exactly how much green levies are personally costing them.
I agree. There should be no ‘green levies’ at all. ‘Green’ electricity generation needs to stand on its own feet. It ought to be up to a centralised authority (a revived Central Electricity Generating Board would be good!) to determine its generating priorities with a view to keeping consumers’ bills as low as reasonably possible.*
I look forward to the day when ministers who obstruct those who would provide us with cheap, reliable electricity and demand expensive and unreliable systems instead are charged with ‘malfeasance in public office’.
* I’d actually go the whole hog and demand that all infrastructure — power stations and transmission lines to the local sub-station — should be nationalised. There are some things that should not be left to the market to determine!
In my professional life I was part of a team running a UK data network. Part of my job was managing availability and reliability. There is no way on God’s green Earth that we could have sold network connections based on the availability and reliability of ruinables.
Having lived through the halcyon days of nationalised practically everything, six months to get your telephone connected etc. culminating in the 1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’ with its rolling blackouts, unburied bodies and innumerable other major inconveniences, I couldn’t disagree more!
In reply to Catweazle … I understand the reservations but it doesn’t have to be that way. You cannot run an efficient national power grid if there isn’t one controlling body who decides how it is managed.
That doesn’t mean generation necessarily needs to be a monopoly but it does mean that it is not the politicians who determine who gets priority.
And the same argument does apply to telecoms infrastructure and to railway track and signalling. Again that doesn’t mean no competition; all it means is that — to use the railway example — the nation owns the track. Who is allowed to run trains and under what conditions is where competition comes into it.
I have loads of sympathy with Catweazle as I was there too. But I’ve come to the same conclusion as Mike Jackson. It’s not an expression of my preferences (please don’t call me a commie), but the reality that market failures in power supply are too great for the market to get a sniff at giving people what they want.
And we don’t have long to wait because we are more-or-less there already. The power generation industry now responds to a loose collection of demands for technology choices made by the government. This includes CfDs for wind generation (segmented into offshore and onshore), the capacity auction for firm generation, and now the RAB model with the (state owned) Great British Nuclear Vehicle to deliver a new fleet of new nuclear stations over the next 10-30 years. That’s almost total government control over “market” entry. But that’s not enough as the government’s decision to phase out coal fired generation means the government is now dictating “market” exit.
The power industry is morphing into an outsourcing organisation. I suppose it maintains the position that power generating assets do not appear on the public books or the PSBR (a couple of the main reasons Thatcher wanted privatisation).
To back up what Catweazle says, the government’s choices will spark debate as they will always be highly debateable. That’s the future we have to live with – if there is something you want to see, you have to appeal through the political process.
The people who want wind generation are already doing this, and have been for many years now. The people who want new nuclear are doing the same.
I still see an important role for coal fired generation, so people who share my views will just need to do the same, and argue as best we can against the decision to ban coal (so that’s what I do).
We all just have to make our cases in the political process we have to live with. That’s the game we are in these days. There isn’t a lot of point in talking about markets when there isn’t a market worth talking about (there is a “clearing mechanism”).
But for fans of the private sector, it is still there in the form of the “outsourcing model” of public sector delivery.
For all practical purposes we have a fully nationalised system already. It is entirely managed by agents of the state via the network of quangos. Formal natonalisation isn’t going to change how it is run, which is laid down by legislation to favour green interests at the expense of consumers. It’s about to become even worse as green interest gets redefined as pursuing net zero while the fig leaf nationalsation of the Future Systems Operator is a sop to the socialists.
What needs to change is the underlying legislation that gives primacy to green interests. You can operate with either a joint venture structure which can work quite well with shared assets, as the interested parties get direct representation on how it is run, or with an independent structure – but first find your Walter Marshall to run it. Incidentally, he was not entirely optimal: he had a tendency to gold plate the system (give or take the effects of miners’ strikes) which was what opened the scope for privatisation in the first place.
The problem with that theory Jordan is that government control is clearly at the mercy of politically motivated groups such as CCC, the Goldsmith Bros. and Carrie Johnson plus the highly invested plethora of Quangocrats and Snivel Serpents all with Virtue Signalling axes to grind who are frustrating our opportunities to take advantage of the resurgence of demand for natural gas primarily as a transition fuel to smooth the transition to ‘Unreliables’.
We need to drill for shale gas on the maximum possible scale both for our own domestic supplies and to exploit the rapidly developing overseas markets which are opening up as a result of the switch away from Russian gas.
This will most definitely not occur while the control of our energy resources and networks are under the control of the politicians as will invariably be the case of the industry if it is nationalised.
W need the likes of Francis Egan of Cuadrilla and Jim Ratcliffe of Ineos sorting out our energy, not John Gummer, “Sir” Reginald Sheffield and Carrie Johnson – and especially not the Trades Unions!
Thank you for ‘Snivel Serpents” it’s made my day 🤣
Rolling blackouts were 1974 (miner’s strike).
1978/1979 was desperate. In the interests of accuracy: the wave of strikes that caused the Winter of Discontent started with Ford, then the lorry drivers, followed by several disputes in the public sector.
The free market is too short-sighted to control the UK domestic energy sector, we’ll end up with gas. That doesn’t mean that the free market shouldn’t operate within the UK domestic energy sector.
The CEGB was monolithic, but it generally got the job done, although the politicians needed to be kept at a distance.
To IDAU
The CEGB did a great job in securing UK power supplies, including growing the national grid infrastructure needed to give an outlet to a large fleet of nukes. The UK’s four main pumped storage units were build to help cope with the overnight output of nuclear generation – a role they could serve well due to the predictability of their duty cycle.
The CEGB had the benefit of the political imperatives of the cold war arms race. This created a need for the industrial complex to produce key elements. Amongst other things, it is worth noting that tritium has a half life of only 12 years and is extremely rare in the natural environment.
The CEGB was an arm of government, which was always going to leave it exposed to lobbying by the politically influential groups of the day. The CEGB built a huge fleet of coal fired power stations to give an outlet to UK mined coal. This gave the UK the headache of over-dependence on the same politically influential groups.
Privatisation didn’t change the problem of influence being exercised by politically influential groups. The dash for gas gave a ready outlet to market for gas producers, and the gas industry has been very successful in completely displacing coal as a primary source of energy in UK supply. So here we are, wondering what to do about it.
To Catweazle
I have no difficulty with what you say, but that “problem” is not unique to the public sector as you can see from my comment above.
It makes sense to drill for shale gas as a means to secure supply, but if the issues with gas price continue (a regional over-dependence on gas), the value and then opportunity cost of shale gas will not solve the affordability problem. Not any time soon at least. As I have said before here, the best way forward is the maximise the UK’s access to total energy supply, and this requires diversification to a fuel which can challenge the dominance of gas. That’s coal.
There may be one or two entrepreneurial types who can play a part in replacing our generating capacity, but there are not enough to scratch the surface when a large power station comes with a capital cost of £500M-£1500M (depending on technology) and a delivery time of 5 – 7 years. There needs to be a number of players involved to test costs, and to provide the development, constructing and financing resources.
And there you will find another politically influential group in the form of investment banks and the big institutional shareholders who are increasingly pulling strings in the boardroom. They come armed with a long list of boxes to tick with their ESG targets, all to distract the private sector away from the fundamental needs of the people who are hoping to benefit form energy supply. So they like renewable, they don’t like fossil fuels, and they won’t touch nuclear.
The big banks demonstrated their utter stupidity during the calamitous banking crisis, and they have learned nothing.
Micky
Well said that man.
(Sorry for the long comment folks)
“For all practical purposes we have a fully nationalised system already.”
Indeed.
Fascism: Strong, autocratic central control of a private economy.
Britain and the U.S. are fascist states.
Here’s the problem for you “government must do it” creeps. Governments make political decisions. They don’t make business decisions. In democratic states of the West, power generation decisions will be based on which faction can garner the most votes for the politicos. Note that the Greens have powerful influence.
If there must be a central committee, make it reps of the power companies. NOT THE GOVERNMENT!!!
“If there must be a central committee, make it reps of the power companies”
Private sector power companies often have a capitalisation in the range of £10bns. Of those who operate in the private sector, their “central committees” (Boards of Directors) have an agenda dictated by institutional shareholders and the banks.
That’s a fact of life ,when they need to borrow £billions to invest … he who pays the piper calls the tune. The tune coming from the banks these days is all about are box ticking and ESG targets.
Just last month, HSBC announced its net zero plan, including “Science-aligned phase down of fossil fuel finance”. Does that sound familiar? Does it sound just like the government?
If so, you’ve got the same issue in the private sector. People you have no realistic chance of influencing, who are not at the cutting-edge of the energy industry, but they are calling the shots. Just because they can. And they have decided to shoot at feelgoodery.
I’m not a fan of government control, and the dead hand of the treasury. But sometimes we have to be pragmatic. It’s like Churchill who said “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”.
Maybe you have a worthwhile case to put forward. Maybe you can explain why you believe the private sector, controlled by ESG-obsessed bankers, can do a better job than public sector management. Calling people “government must do it creeps” hasn’t quite convinced me … maybe you could try a little harder next time.
After privatisation of the enrrgy sector, prices fell, investment rose, service improved and innovation expanded greatly. That only changed when Labour came to power and started to interfere. If you claim markets fail or that you somehow know what markets will produce, you are mistaken. As for governments running things, that only works when what governments want is what consumers want, and rarely even then.
“Does it sound just like the government?”
Corporations resist government interference initially. Over time, they realize resistance is futile, and form partnerships with government. GE and the US, Krupp and Germany 80 years ago. By working with government, they get some influence on shaping regulations AND, the biggie, structuring them where their competition can’t comply. Corporate alliances drive out the little guys.
No Western corporation exists in a vacuum without government control. Markets aren’t free, by a long shot.
The solution is to massively cut regulation.
But some people WANT government to have control. It is rooted in the naive belief that government loves you and is comprised of precious souls. Failing to note that all of the people they know working in government do it because they couldn’t find a job somewhere else. So they get to be in charge of the companies that refused to hire them.
“Failing to note that all of the people they know working in government do it because they couldn’t find a job somewhere else. So they get to be in charge of the companies that refused to hire them”.
Ain’t that the truth. Reagan was absolutely spot on with his “10 worst words in the English language”
Show me one centrlised government department that actually functions as it should. The CEGB was nothing short of of a disaster and provided lousy service and costly electricity. No governement department, irrespective of the political party in charge is fi for purpose. That includes the Border Farce, The Roayl Air Farce, The No Hope Service, The so called Environment Agency and so forth. Give the politicians even more say and we will end up with even more unaffordable so called green power, and those with any money left in the socialist utopia will be subsidising those who cannot or will not pay.
I do not want to go back to the likes of the CEGB, British Gas, BT or the Water Board. But hey, the union barons would love it.
…the private sector, controlled by ESG-obsessed bankers…”
This too shall pass.
This is in fact being rolled back right now, mainly as a result of the crimp on fossil fuel supplies caused by the Ukraine affair.
Of course, it was never going to last, such phantasmagorical notions never do, as decreasing shareholder money drives out crackpot theories about pleasing noisy minority “stakeholder” interests.
It will be business as usual for fossil fuel investment real soon now.
It has been such an interesting discussion, and thanks to everybody who chimed-in. There is more to unite us than divide us. I’m no fan of public sector, but my position on power supply is one of pragmatism. I see many signs this is being accepted by the government, as I have described above. This is nothing more than selection of the best of a bad lot as there is no point in self flagellation in the name of market doctrine. Let’s leave that to the windy greenies.
Catweazle says “It will be business as usual for fossil fuel investment real soon now.” You summarise a significant element of my investment portfolio in one short sentence. There are plenty of good bets out there, and their being out of favour among the ESG crowd just makes them better for you and I.
Dig-baby-dig. Drill-baby-drill.
Then there are people who hate freedom. So much so that they don’t care that government is murderous and destructive. As long as they control how people live. To them, a gawd awful power supply is fine, as long as government is running it. The goal isn’t cheap, available energy. It’s government control.
Mr Jordan is calling for control.
If you really insist on putting it on those terms Mr Gamecock, then it is a question of control versus chaos.
I watched a news article, mentioning how Biden has release 1 million boepd from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Link below, and explanation of the Petroleum Reserve.
Are you against the US Government holding a security fuel reserve gamecock?
If so, and there is a security crisis against the US, resulting in the mobilisation of the US military, where will the US military obtain the crucial fuel supplies? Without fuel, all those fighthing machines reduce to lumps of metal to be shot at.
To take this further, are you against the US even having a state funded military? If so, I should think Vlad the Destroyer will be very interested in your views.
Enquiring minds are eagerly waiting your answers.
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a stockpile to preserve access to oil in case of natural disasters, national security issues and other events. Maintained by the Energy Department, the reserves are stored in caverns created in salt domes along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. Before Biden’s orders, there were roughly 605 million barrels of petroleum in the reserve.
The reserve was established by Congress in 1975 after the oil crisis in 1973 when oil-exporting nations throttled their production and caused energy prices to soar.”
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/03/31/gas-prices-biden-release-oil-strategic-reserves/7229635001/
One commentator on last night’s news was arguing that the change/reduction needs to be targeted at the poor for maximum effect. This is the demographic least likely to be able to adjust to the higher costs.
The local news last night was saying how heat pumps etc. could save people ‘loads’ on their bills but they couldn’t afford to buy them in the first place. Such logic fails/deceptions are common in the green arena. How does spending £25k on insulation upgrades and new heating systems to reduce a heating bill by a few £hundred a year SAVE you anything!
The obvious point is that with electricity costs rising to double what they were last year and treble next year, how can anyone but the rich afford to run an ineffective heat pump?
In fact compared to gas it won’t reduce your heating bill at all, it will massively increase it.
The French have an apt saying.
“I talk with my heart but vote with my wallet.”
It seems that we have things in common with the French after all.
The painful truth about net zero is slowly coming out and people don’t like it. For years we’ve been told that renewables would lead to cheap electricity, Boris was even saying that last week, but the truth is out there now.
There is no nation so thoroughly convinced that other people should give them money as the French, from the individual, through the communes, departments and regions to the nation demanding stuff from the EU. I have a house in France (there now) and even intelligent, well-educated business people who have worked abroad refuse to give up anything or to reform anything if it appears to give them something funded by somebody else. Yet in the next breath they will moan about how high taxes are and how their children can’t find a job!
Frogs are both greedy, and stupid. Especially Parisiens.
Voters won’t to pay more for green Levis when they can get blue cheaper. Why should green Levis by enforced by law. Let the public and business decide which to buy. Green or blue.
*seven in 10 people want them removed from their energy bills*
Meanwhile in a shock poll, 100% of those interviewed said they wanted their taxes to be reduced (to zero if possible) and that somebody else should pay for the services they used.
Amongst those interviewed who paid no tax at all, this proportion increased to 120%.
I carried out my own straw poll, and 100% of those interviewed (namely me) said that the problem of poverty could be solved simply by making everybody rich. Why is that so hard?
This proves the point that polling is a joke – agreed, yet, the Gov uses it to declare everyone is ‘all behind’ the rush back to the stone age that net zero entails…. because all polls lack context. The additional layer that is the lack of honesty in any debate about this topic (cancelling all dissent) does rather queer the pitch on this ‘agenda’. If the truth would out, we could get back to building a safe, happy society. Shedding the green industrial complex really would give us a peace dividend!!
Whenever I see a politicuan quoting a poll with a majority in favour of something, I link to the Yougov poll that shows a majority in favour of reintroducing capital punishment (particularly high for terrorism). Oddly they have no interest in doing what the public say they want on that, because that majority is “populusm”.
Thanks for putting more flesh on the bones of my ironic comments.
There are so many ways to undermine the supposed usefulness of polls.
Just one more point for now.
These polls are often commissioned and paid for by organisations with an agenda. The pollsters are profit making companies, often more widely experienced in commercial surveys for consumer products, food etc.
But even the Office for National Statistics gets some of its “information” by polling ….
Sorry that I haven’t got more time to elaborate.
PS None of this means that I am in favour of “green levies” or any other aspect of “net zero”.
Net zero describes the value to the conomy and the effect on mostly natural climate change rather well. Literally money for nothing ……
I prefer blue Levis myself.
I went to black denim as blue denim is so beloved of the middle-aged. and overweight. Black is more slimming.
What about us old, slightly overweighties, who don’t want to look like Goths in black?!
Then there’s the lawyers’ special: Sue Denim. And their clerks will wear pseud enim.
It’s not only heating and cooking i.e. electricity and gas. There are also extortionate taxes on petrol and diesel.
The government has been minting it with the extra VAT on the astronmical fuel prices. It could charge itself a windfall tax and cut the green levies with the money 😃
Almost certainly not. I can only spend my money once. If I’m paying more for energy, I’m buying less of other stuff, so paying less VAT on those items.
A point that never seems to be mentioned is that increased tax on transport fuels increases the cost of everything that has to be transporter by road or rail.
My perception is the general public and most politicians believe that renewable energy is equivalent to fossil fuels so paying a bit extra solves the problem.
The fundamental issue is that this paradigm is wrong.
Cookers52,
exactly my conclusion also, due to a media that accepts all the disingenuous information put out by vested interests and green NGOs and never prints or broadcasts the many negative aspects of renewable generation. Christopher Booker (RIP) was an exception with no one I know who really replaced him?
It’s not a case of “to pull back from his Net Zero commitments”, but ‘to eliminate them, totally and permanently’. This would of course abolish subsidies to wind & solar causing their collapse, which is the required outcome.
Maybe the 31% who say they are happy to pay green levies would do it voluntarily?
December 2021, coal wasn’t much more expensive than gas for heating the home.
https://nottenergy.com/resources/energy-cost-comparison/
It would be interesting to see what the price comparison is now.
“All sales of traditional house coal will be banned in England from 1 May 2023.” from:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/selling-coal-for-domestic-use-in-england
Don’t they know there’s an energy emergency going on.?
My figures for my area. 1 ton of house coal (delivered) £430 so 43p per kg. 8.1kWh per kg @75% gives just over 6kWh effective so just on 7p per kWh which is now on a par or even cheaper than gas. I’m in Kent, I suspect you can probably get house coal cheaper in other parts of the country.
Thanks Ray
Worth noting that gas is now less than half what it was at the peak in early March and only a bitcabovecshere it was atcthe start of the year. Oil is now at $85/bbl and electricity prices have similarly fallen.
But petrol and diesel prices are still sky high. Funny that?
Why does clicking “reply” in the e-mail not actually start composing an e-mail message, but instead starts a web browser? The “like” also starts a web browser, but where are such “likes” actually displayed?
Look at the amount of tax at point of sale on petrol and diesel. Those taxes at the very least double the price to customers.
It gets worse. Diesel is now more expensive than petrol. That never used to be the case.And what is that doing to the price of _everything_?
>>petrol and diesel prices sky high
Gas appears to be spiking again on the news that Russia has cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria.
Brent crude is at $106 per barrel; not sure where the figure of $85 comes from – maybe that’s the US?
The whole Net Zero fiasco is yet another example of the saying – there is nothing so bad that politicians cannot make it worse. Wasn’t it Ronald Reagan who said that the most frightening thing that anyone could hear is ” I’m from the government and I’m here to help you”.
I lived through the late Seventies Winter of Discontent and the 3-day week, miner’s strike etc, at least then there appeared to be a recognition on the part of Thatcher’s administration that she had to keep the lights on. The religious accolytes of the Net Zero religion haven’t grasped this basic fact – a 21st C lifestyle is impossible without the guarantee of electricity available 24/7, and that this is impossible without restricting renewables to the periphery and basing the majority of electricity generation on nuclear and fossil fuels (including coal). These accolytes have also failed to grasp that there are many areas where electric power is significantly inferior to use of the appropriate fossil fuel – eg iron ore smelting where the coke input functions as both reactant to reduce the iron oxide to iron as well as providing the necessary heat for the process.
I’d like to see the questions asked, and how they were phrases, on the two opinion polls that produced such different outcomes. Opinion polls aren’t worth a row of beans unless the questions are fair, objective and non-leading. I take them both with a pinch of salt, though I suspect that if you ask people if they want to pay a lot of money for something, you’ll usually get a negative answer. Politicians should remember that.
You can find the Express polling here:
https://www.techneuk.com/tracker/expresspolling/
See the other thread for the PublicFirst polling and be sure you get the 121 question corrected version.
Should we save the Earth? 100% yes.
Do you want to pay to do it? 85% no.
..to which the obvious response is: ” Save the earth from what? “
If I perpetrated a scam based on fake science and then forced people to pay for the consequences, I would expect to be locked away for some considerable time.