Clean, efficient electric heating is one of the best options for government to translate the Clean Power mission into energy bill savings for households. But poor policy decisions stand in the way of consumers feeling the benefits.
I don’t know why there is such a focus on levies/taxes in this article. For energy, the VAT rate is only 5% - even if we scrapped it entirely, it’d barely make a dent. I truly do not understand where the “getting rid of levies will cut energy bills by over £500” thing comes from.
The only way to bring bills down is to bring the cost of energy down by increasing supply and bringing down our average cost per MWh for production of energy.
The good news is that the government, to their credit, have been doing that.
The bad news is that this isn’t a “press the ‘fix everything’ button in No. 10, then everything will be hunky dory” situation, it’s a “take action now so that we can benefit from it in 5-10 years” situation.
E: Reading E3G’s own Energy Bills Charter, the only levy they want to remove is ‘legacy costs’, which they claim would save roughly £80 per household per year. They want it instead to be paid from income tax on workers. Legacy costs, btw, is things like insulation schemes and solar feed in tariffs. Of course, if it is paid via income tax, that’d be an additional £3bn the government will have to find from somewhere, likely meaning more cuts.
I don’t know where this alleged £500+ has come from. It seems other-worldly optimistic to me.
Your lobes are showing.