One of Labour’s most prominent green backers has turned on the party’s flagship home energy programme, arguing that nearly £2.7 billion earmarked for heat pump subsidies should be diverted to fill the Government’s growing defence spending gap instead.
Dale Vince, founder of green energy company Ecotricity and a long-standing Labour donor, said the Boiler Upgrade Scheme — which offers households up to £7,500 towards the cost of installing a heat pump under Ed Miliband’s Warm Homes Plan — amounted to handing public money to people who already had the means to pay for the upgrades themselves. With Britain facing mounting pressure to increase military expenditure amid the US-Iran conflict, Vince argued the priorities were wrong.
“Labour should ditch heat pump handouts for people who already have money and support our cash-strapped military instead,” he said. “Trump’s war against Iran is putting Britain in the firing line. We should be bolstering our defence, not handing over thousands of pounds in subsidies to people who don’t need it. Let’s keep the boilers we have and buy the bombs we need.”
Downing Street rejected the suggestion. A spokesperson said the Government remained committed to investing in renewables and nuclear energy as part of a broader strategy to reduce household energy bills.
Vince’s intervention arrives at a particularly uncomfortable moment for the Chancellor. Rachel Reeves is under significant pressure to explain how the Government intends to honour its commitment to raise defence spending to three per cent of GDP by the end of the decade. Having already increased the overall tax burden substantially, Reeves has indicated reluctance to raise taxes further to fund the increase. However, proposals to fund defence through welfare cuts — suggested by former defence secretary Lord Robertson — are expected to face fierce resistance from Labour MPs and trade unions. The Government is also examining defence bonds as a potential mechanism for ring-fencing military funding without directly affecting welfare spending or taxation.
Miliband has defended the Warm Homes Plan robustly, describing the £15 billion package unveiled in March as the largest public investment in home upgrades in British history, designed to cut bills, tackle fuel poverty and reduce Britain’s dependence on international fossil fuel markets.
But the scheme has attracted criticism beyond Vince. Representatives of the insulation industry have warned that channelling investment into heat pumps, batteries and solar panels without first addressing the UK’s widespread problem of poorly insulated housing risks wasting billions in public money.
Vince himself has been sceptical of heat pumps for some years, having used them personally for two decades. He has argued consistently that they are less efficient than widely claimed, carry higher running costs than gas boilers in practice, and deliver meaningful results only in homes that are already well insulated. In January he described them as “not a national solution” to the problem of high energy bills.
