Nothing ever seems to deter Ed Miliband, the green commissar of this Labour government. He has already brought back the boiler tax, adding a few hundred pounds to the bill for anyone unlucky enough to need a new heating system this winter. Now he is relaxing the size and noise restrictions on heat pumps, allowing them to screech through the night. At this rate, the typical British city will be turned into a cacophonous heat pump farm, with a few pale, sleep-deprived humanoids trapped inside. But hold on. This is crazy. In reality we are doubling down on a failing technology, and risking civil unrest in the process.
For a man who typically despises any form of deregulation, Miliband makes one crucial exception. If it is part of his net-zero crusade then it is perfectly fine. Too big? Never mind. Too noisy? No problem. Too expensive? What does cost matter when the planet has to be saved? We already have subsidies for heat pumps, quotas and taxes on the traditional alternative. Now they will be allowed to fill the night with noise as well.
And yet, there are two big problems with Miliband’s decision. To start with, why are we obsessing over a technology that doesn’t seem to work very well? If your dishwasher sounded like a fighter jet with the afterburners switched on we might suggest the boffins in the lab figured out a way to make it quieter. If mobile masts took up half the street we’d ask the manufacturers to go back to the drawing board and make them smaller.
Heat pumps may or may not be the best way of moving towards carbon neutral home heating. But if we are going to install millions of them, then surely they need to be fit for purpose, in the same way that any other mass market product should be? Pumps need to be quiet, compact, and cheap. Until they are, they either need to get better, or else we need to look at alternatives.
Instead, we will risk splitting communities apart. Relations between neighbours can often be fraught at the best of times. There are arguments over parking, parties and fences. Now we can add heat pumps to the list. If one house is keeping the whole street awake with its heating that hardly seems reasonable, but presumably the self-righteous eco warriors will insist it is OK, and will have the Government on side.
Nor does it stop there. Miliband also wants us to do our washing at three in the morning to even out the load on the grid. But if a rackety drier wakes up half an apartment block in the middle of the night, that hardly seems reasonable either. Likewise, cabling for electric cars now runs across many pavements, but it is easy to trip over, and we surely would not allow that it was not part of the green crusade. Very soon, communities will be at war with one another, arguing about every new rule handed down from Westminster, until tempers are stretched beyond breaking point.
That is crazy. We can debate whether climate change is an imminent catastrophe, and whether the UK, accounting for less than one per cent of global emissions, really needs to lead the world in combating it. But regardless of that, surely we can all agree that whatever technologies we adopt for the transition to carbon neutrality need to be cheap, effective and safe, and mustn’t disrupt the communities in which we all live. Miliband doesn’t seem to care about any of those tests – and instead appears intent on driving the country to the brink of civil unrest.