Homeowners hit with ‘boiler tax’ to pay for heat pump drive
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
I did warn you!!
Homeowners face being hit with a “boiler tax” as manufacturers attempt to offset the cost of the heat pump rollout.
Worcester Bosch has announced the price of all its gas boilers will increase by £120 in the new year, while Vaillant is also preparing to increase its prices by £95.
The Government aims to install 600,000 heat pumps a year from 2028, but Worcester Bosch said it had “no option” but to raise the price of boilers as the UK market “does not have the scale” to meet government targets.
It said it took the decision following the implementation of new rules designed to incentivise heat pump installations which will result in companies who undershoot government-mandated quotes being fined.
Worcester Bosch said “to cover the costs of these fines and remain in business” it had “no option but to raise the prices of the boilers we sell to meet what is in effect a boiler tax”.
As part of its net zero drive to reduce carbon emissions, the Government will introduce its “Clean Heat Market Mechanism” (CHMM) in January 2024.
The price increases are being implemented to offset government plans to fine manufacturers for failing to meet sales quotas for heat pumps from next year.
The scheme aims to incentivise manufacturers to sell more heat pumps by requiring that 4pc of all gas boiler sales are matched in volume with heat pump sales.
New builds, which are required by law to have a heat pump from 2025, are exempt from the scheme.
However, industry forecasts suggest around half of heat pumps set to be installed next year will be in newly built houses, and will therefore not count towards the sales quota.
It is estimated that 80,000 heat pumps will be installed in 2024, but only 40,000 of these will be retrofit installations.
Based on a boiler market of 1.5 million homes, government plans would require manufacturers to install 60,000 heat pumps in its first year – 50pc higher than the forecast market size, Worcester Bosch said, adding “penalties are therefore inevitable”.
This target would increase to 90,000 installations in the scheme’s second year, and to 450,000 in its fourth. For each heat pump a manufacturer fails to sell under that target, it will be fined £3,000.
Worcester Bosch said the targets were “clearly unachievable within the timescales allowed”, and that manufacturers would have no choice but to “pass these fines onto the market in the form of a CHMM levy”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/net-zero/homeowners-hit-boiler-tax-pay-for-heat-pump-drive/
This is only the start. As the heat pump target rises, the fines will get bigger.
And we cab expect exactly the same thing to happen with the price of ICE cars next year.
The government is giving us a choice. But heat pumps and EVs, which we cannot afford. Or pay a tax.
Meanwhile the DESNZ is disgracefully trying to gaslight us:
How on earth do they expect boiler manufacturers to cover the cost of these fines, if they do not pass them onto customers? It’s like expecting garages not to pass on increases in fuel duty.
As for the targets being “ realistic and fully achievably”, they are taking the public for idiots. The public do not want to buy the useless things, so how can boiler manufacturers sell them?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.
How in any market place, can you fine manufacturers, if the public does not buy a more expensive and inferior product mandated by the government for the myth of saving the planet.
It is just not going to work, same with Battery cars.
This sounds better than fining companies for not selling buggy whips and hair shirts. Make that treadmills and wool sweaters — used in winter these will keep you warm so you can turn the heater off.
I am now feeling smug as I had a new gas boiler installed in August.
This is nothing short of totalitarianism where the only choice is the one the government gives you.
The climate zealots are after western democracies and won’t stop until they have full control. Beyond sinister.
What will most likely happen is that manufacturers will wind down production of gas boilers which people do want so that they are not forced to build heat pumps which they cannot sell. End result: a shortage of gas boilers and probably a withdrawal of gas boiler manufacturers from the UK.
I bought a new gas boiler a couple of months ago which should see me out, £3k installed, 8 year warranty.
If they’re fining manufacturers, presumably they mean UK-based ones? I bought a Dutch one made by Intergas (‘all Intergas boilers have a maximum of four moving parts and, with fewer parts, there’s less to go wrong’) last year.
https://theintergasshop.co.uk/
This is what you get with the Tory Socialist Party.
… aye, or the Conservative Labour Party, nor the Dim Luv Party. Just like the German’s CDU FDU SDP etc DLP ? vote for Non of the above and go speak to the Heron: only around 12 Gig Fish in the pond but there are 39 needing fed. Sunny is off to bed and it is not Hogmanay yet ( no coal)
Have to substitute a Double A for coal
They are playing with fire. People accept that government must tax the people to pay for its just activities. Using taxation as a tool to force compliance to political policies is going to piss off the public.
Using taxation as a tool to force compliance to a belief is also going to piss off the public, probably.
Of all the things done by this government, I find these fines the most despicable and infuriating. How any government that is not coercively despotic can fine businesses for selling people legal goods is beyond me. We have a lack of growth, the highest taxes ever, a cost of living problem, yet still this government keeps making life harder and harder for the people it exists to serve and help. It is pre-Revolutionary France, elites taking from the mases and caring nothing for their suffering. Disgusting and shameful. I’d glad join a revolution.
I’ve pondered on that French Revolution point before now.
I think you’re on the right lines because government policies like the one highlighted are so unreasonable that there will eventually come a reckoning.
Western governments have got away with it for decades because the private sector has innovated and grown and we have got better off. But we may have now reached the point where the destruction of wealth by the government outweighs the creation of wealth by the private sector and we rapidly get worse off. Governments are stupidly relying on the private sector to keep bailingvthrm out with cheaper and better Green tech but it’s not happening.
Cheaper and better Green tech doesn’t exist. More expensive and worse is what it is.
In a word . . . decadence.
One has to wonder whether there are any intelligent people in the Civil Service.
Guardianistas to a man, woman and transgender
you can be both intelligent and ignorant which is a dangerous combination.
Lots of people who do well in exams, but almost all are blinded by political prejudice and have no interest in changing those prejudices. They disdain actual Economics and believe their opinions are better for reasons that are not very obvious.
Having qualifications that prove your knowledge mean little if they are not allied to common sense. For example during Covid the well qualified head of Birmingham healthcare celebrated that his Nightingale Hospital had not been used. So….putting people with an infectious disease in hospitals with people who were weakened by sickness was a good idea was it?
Yes, but I’m retiring in two weeks, and I’m not sanguine about what’s going to be around afterward.
Ask any enlightened liberal if a poor person should pay more tax than a rich person. They would say no.
But schemes like this boiler tax and charging poor people driving gasoline and diesel vehicles high fuel taxes to pay for roads that EV;s don’t pay and carbon credits to subsidize EV purchases is regressive taxation that hits the poor very hard.
There is a lot of things that liberal governments implement that end up being paid for by lower income people through increased costs of goods or services low-income people use. In the US, part of the reason healthcare costs are so high is that people whose healthcare is paid through Medicaid or Medicare, get subsidized by people who don’t have government provided health insurance. As a result, we have the most expensive healthcare in the world.
California has been using the same strategy for energy, specifically to reduce fuel use and increase renewable electricity generation. It has resulted in the most expensive fuel and the most expensive electricity in the USA as a result. The rich get the benefits, the poor pay higher prices.
It’s the myth of climate change/global warming that gets me. Dodgy computer programmes insist it’s happening, pursued by interest groups and especially the BBC. It’s not happening. The sea level is not rising. The same wrong predictions were being made thirty years ago. And if the temperature, affected by climactiuc changes, did rise a degree or two, so what? Plants and animals would adapt, as they have done throughout the last few thousand years. This nonsense does make me cross!
None of the predictions of catastrophe made at the first Earth Day in 1970 have come to pass. “Give it time” is often the response to that fact. Hard to dispel feelings of bad times ahead.
” Plants and animals would adapt, as they have done throughout the last few thousand years.”
Plants and animals have been adapting to a changing climate for billions of years.
Uhhh . . . plants and animals haven’t been around for billions of years.
Algae and bacteria have been around for billions of years. If you don’t categorise algae and bacteria as plants / animals then an alternative view is that “life has been adapting to a changing climate for billions of years”
“If you don’t categorise algae and bacteria as plants / animals”
Nobody does.
“life has been adapting to a changing climate for billions of years”
True.
Don’t remember this in the Tory manifesto
The vague Net Zero commitment. But most people assumed it was far in the future, somebody else would pay and things wouldn’t get worse.
Vague being the word for it. No cost benefit analysis. No mention of how much it will cost taxpayers and consumers. And there still isn’t. You have the silly little girl Coutinho spouting that increasing the cost of wind energy will save us money!!
It gets worse.
According to the Grauniad the government has backed plans to ban gas and hydrogen ready boilers from new build homes in England from 2025. The paper admits this will raise construction costs, neglecting to mention this will also raise the cost of buying the houses. It then goes on to quote several know nothing greens that say heat pumps will reduce the cost of energy bills. Total garbage.
” According to the Grauniad the government has backed plans to ban gas and hydrogen ready boilers from new build homes in England from 2025. ”
It’s nuts! The average punter (me) has no effective representation to combat this nonsense.
So much for Sunak’s lies about Net Zero.
Sunak, is a bought and paid for, CCP intelligence asset, just like his comrade Across the Pond, Barrator Joe Biden.
Just to show how stupid the government is, developments that wanted to be all electric have been rejected by the Grid as there was insufficient supply. This might also affect individuals daft enough to degrade their heating but is a real problem for new estates that require a new connection. Net Zero delusions will increasingly keep hitting the brick wall of reality.
Looks like the Net zero crowd forgot to include the Magic Unicorns in their mandate.
Okay call me naive but how does this apply to foreign manufacturers?
Am I wrong in assuming this Clean Heat Market Mechanism “penalty” can only be applied to UK manufactured goods?
So if I import say one of these https://www.usboiler.net/product/k2-combi-high-efficiency-condensing-boiler is there a penalty applied? Somehow I doubt the US government want to be involved in penalising their manufacturers.
DESNZ says:
Targets
As set out above, we are proposing to introduce an obligation on the manufacturers of gas and oil boilers sold on the UK market to hold credits corresponding to qualifying installations of heat pumps in proportion to their relevant UK boiler sales.
Click to access clean_heat_market_mechanism.pdf
It’s the same as with EVs. The Govt admitted that it could not enforce these fines on, say, Mercedes selling Germa made cars in the UK market
Neither will it be able to fine importers of German made boilers
Is it still true that you can buy non-condensing boilers in Scotland?
Well Elon’s here to help.
Tesla claims Powerwall with solar is cheaper than a backup generator
Tesla has released a new comparison report claiming Powerwall with solar is cheaper than a traditional backup generator.
For years now, Tesla has enjoyed a giant backlog of Powerwall orders, but now that production has ramped up, the automaker has worked through most of that backlog, and it has to start generating more demand for the home energy storage product.
I can’t believe that an arrangement like this would be any good on a week of dull days like I’ve just endured
Back of a fag packet calculation. UK solar capacity of 15GW has generated 45.65GW over the last 5 days according to https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/
I make that a capacity factor of just 1.8%. So if you had a typical 3.5kW solar panel array you would have achieved 3.5 x 168 @1.8% = 10.6kWh divide 7 = a daily average of just 1.5kWh. Good luck surviving on that….well you could if you had a gas fridge/freezer, a gas boiler (on a gravity circuit), a gas oven, a gas hob, gas lighting and of course a supply of gas! 1.5kWhe will run the 14inch LED TV, router and recharge your mobile/laptop but not much else.
Sorry typo, should read ” has generated 45.65GWh”
Saw an excellent stat. on Anne & Phelim Scoop; solar panels in California 40.5TWh, solar panels in whole of Africa 18.5TWh, 2022 figures, luxury, niche electricity.
https://youtu.be/ZVrvDAzgYwM (at 51:00)
I think my Honda Eu10i (1kW) and some Aspen fuel will just about keep me alive, plus a couple of Tilley lamps.
Two “D” batteries are cheaper than a backup generator. But I don’t believe a Tesla anything is cheaper than something else. You can get a Generac for a third of the cost of a Powerwall.
BTW, on the second day of the outage, the generator is still working.
If you want more of something, subsidize it–EVs. If you want less of something, tax it–gas-fired boilers. When none of that works, just start fining the manufacturers, surely THAT will work, right? Wake up, green-new-dealers–no one wants your imaginary solutions to the non-existent “climate crisis.”
Someone let AEP know.
France says ‘non’ to EVs made in China
Today, France has revealed its list of electric vehicles now eligible for federal tax incentives of up to €7,000. As expected, EVs made in China – including Tesla’s Model 3 and the Dacia Spring, the cheapest EV on the market – didn’t make the cut.
And hot on the heels of that, the energy companies want those who do pay their bills to pay more to cover those that can’t.
Here in central Washington USA, the electric provider acts as a “pass through” actor. A local charity gets money voluntarily provided by the customer — me — via a monthly charge added to my bill.
The charity provides multiple ways of helping people that apply. Neither I nor the electric provider knows who gets what.
How many private jets at COP 28 ?
One of those annoying Heat Pump threads, where every con put up was answered with the same drivel, I asked what happens when its -5 and there’s a power cut? The answer?…. an air source heat pump is cheaper to heat your home than LPG, Oil, Coal and Electric Storage Heaters. Air source heat pumps work still in – 5. If you’re subject to regular power cuts, an air source heat pump is not suitable for you. So how do I know when I’m going to get a power cut?
“So how do I know when I’m going to get a power cut?”
Easy – live in South Africa – we get the cuts on schedule. Except, of course, when there are ACTUAL breakdowns on top of the “load shedding” cuts. And many of those are caused by “affirmative shoppers” cutting the mains cables to steal the copper!
Mr. Wood: Great comment. When you hear air-source heat pumps are cheaper to run blah, blah, blah…the thing they leave out is the temperature when they hit the much vaunted COPs. At 40 degrees C it would be cheaper to put sweaters on the children and burn your furniture on the hearth. Subjugation is the goal of all this green nonsense; control is the goal.
They should be incentivising people to get the most efficient gas boiler they can this will just leave them spewing out higher levels of carbon than they could and like old coal fired power stations being responsible for a disproportionate level of pollution.
I don’t see “incentivising people” as a legitimate function of government.
Nor do i but if they are going to meddle at least do something that realises the right outcome.
Especially when what they are trying to achieve will be a disaster and is based on unproven – or you could argue disproven – science.
OFGEM snuck out the final recycle value premium for ROCs for the 2022-23 accounting period the other day. Some £6.88/ROC to add to the cashout value of £52.88/ROC making a total value of £59.76/ROC. Given the cashout price for the current 2023-24 year is £59.01/ROC and that we have had disappointing renewables generation so far, more than offsetting lower demand, it seems the total value could be at least £67/ROC.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/renewables-obligation-late-payment-distribution-2022-2023
Link to a response to the legislation.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmpublic/Energy/memo/EB03.htm