Most Britons have no intention of installing a heat pump. Given the cost of electricity in the UK, that’s not unreasonable. Ros Taylor looks at why it is so hard to tempt them away from gas boilers.
‘Not two blokes talking about politics or sport. No, this is two blokes talking about heat pumps.” Not the most compelling pitch for a podcast, but the listeners like it: The Happy Heat Pump Podcast has a 4.9* rating on Apple. For middle-class Britons — mostly men, it must be said — with cash to spare, heat pumps are in fashion. Installations went up 52 percent last year. People want to feel they are doing their bit to fight climate change, and the pumps use three to four times less energy than the gas boilers in 80 percent of UK homes.
But heat pumps are still a minority interest in the UK. Even though households can claim a grant of £7,500 towards one, the high upfront cost is a major barrier when utilities bills are rising. Households must find around £4,500 themselves, which is twice the price of a gas boiler. This is a major reason why only around 100,000 pumps were sold last year, a tiny fraction of the 28.4 million households in the UK.
Stuart Hedges had his pump installed in January 2024. “My wife and I own a 1970s former council house on a residential estate, just a very ordinary sort of place. It’s mid-terrace so there are only two external walls to think about.
‘As heat pumps run at a lower temperature than gas boilers you need more radiator surface area to compensate, so it was no surprise that all our radiators needed replacing. We also needed a new hot water cylinder. As the heat pump is on the front of the house we needed planning permission, which was an annoying extra bit of bureaucracy to get through but not too difficult.
’The work itself took a week which is quite impressive considering how much there was to do. We didn’t have to move out, and Octopus [an energy provider] lent us plug-in electric heaters.’ He says the house is warmer than before, and ‘there’s no noise at all inside the house, and just a gentle hum outside.’
Why the British are sceptical
But the average Briton is not enthusiastic about the technology. Heat pumps are considered ugly, not worth it for poorly insulated and older homes (not true), useless in freezing temperatures (not true either) and compared to a gas boiler, the installation is lengthy. It is easier just to wait until the old boiler packs in — which inevitably happens in winter, when there is no time to apply for a grant or wait for a specialist engineer to become available. Much press coverage is negative. Recent headlines have included ‘My heat pump works so badly in winter I have to use my wood stove’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘My neighbour’s noisy heat pump is making my life a misery’ (Telegraph) and ‘My heat pump is a money trap’ (Daily Mail). The news site DeSmog revealed last year that some of these articles are generated by a PR firm hired by an organisation with an interest in keeping gas boilers.
Critics who say heat pumps are almost as costly to run as gas boilers, however, are right. This is because electricity is around four times more expensive per unit than gas in Britain. Nesta, the energy agency, explains that this is because the wholesale price of generation is set by the cost of producing the ‘last unit’ of electricity needed to meet demand and gas power stations, rather than renewables, meet this extra demand. Electricity is also liable for carbon taxes while gas and oil are not, and there are various levies that only apply to electricity bills.
In fact, before the energy crisis the electricity-to-gas price ratio was even higher. The Energy Price Guarantee introduced in 2022 lowered it, making heat pumps more attractive.
Can we cut the cost of electricity?
Unless pumps become considerably cheaper and more efficient in the coming years, the only way to make heat pumps more attractive is to lower the cost of electricity. Since householders who use gas also pay for electricity, the government might try to do this by switching levies to gas bills and hoping the change will go unnoticed. But this would be politically toxic while bills are still very high. Less well-off households cannot just switch off their boilers and find £4,500 for a new heating system: those who rent have no control over which fuel they use, anyway. The outcry last autumn over the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment for better-off pensioners, as well as the decision to cut petrol and diesel duty by 5 percent in 2022, shows how intolerable Britons find high fuel prices.
In the medium to long term, the cost of generating electricity should fall. The Labour government will soon need to decide whether to follow the advice of the energy regulator Ofgem and make electricity cheaper in areas with a lot of windfarms and solar — though that policy will have losers. It will also need to build the infrastructure to move the electricity generated by renewables more efficiently around the country.
Another strategy is to encourage heat pump owners to use electricity at times when there is less pressure on the National Grid. Peak electricity consumption is between 4pm and 7pm, when people come home from work and cook dinner. Octopus has special tariffs for heat pump owners, with electricity costing around a third or two-thirds of the peak rate at quieter times of the day. More ambitiously, it has introduced a ‘Smart Tracker’ where the price changes every day according to the wholesale market. Given how much the cost of electricity fluctuates, customers can save a reasonable amount by not turning on the oven, taking shorter showers and postponing an electric vehicle charge. So far, however, Octopus is the only company to offer dynamic pricing.
No compulsion, just encouragement
Making heat pumps compulsory for anyone replacing their boiler is out of the question. Ministers fear it would boost support for the populist right party Reform, which is already approaching Labour’s vote share in polls. The original 2035 cut-off for gas boilers has been abandoned.
And while the current subsidy for new heat pumps is very generous and makes them more economical in the long run, it is only affordable because few people have taken it up. If pumps suddenly exploded in popularity, voters would ask why already well-off households were enjoying such a large bung from the state. The government has already been quietly topping up the budget for the scheme.
Quietly, however, the government has made some progress since it was elected in July. No new builds will have gas boilers after this year, heat pumps will no longer need planning permission, and the government has tweaked an unpopular policy called the ‘boiler tax’ which was scrapped last year. This would have fined gas and oil boiler manufacturers if they failed to switch a percentage of new installations to heat pumps. As a result, they put their prices up. Now the fines will be much lower, and the scheme will begin later, so that manufacturers have more time to adapt.
Overcoming misinformation about heat pumps is the first challenge for the UK. Reducing the price of electricity is just as important. Neither will be easy in a country that has prized gas since it was first discovered in the North Sea, and expects it to be cheap.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.
