Rishi Sunak under fire over £1bn energy-efficiency plan after Tory manifesto pledged nine times as much

Rishi Sunak has been accused of watering down a Conservative manifesto pledge with a £1bn programme to plug energy-leaking buildings — after the party promised £9.2bn would be spent.

The cash — part of the chancellor’s “mini-budget”, being unveiled this week — is also a fraction of the tens of billions being spent on a green recovery in Germany and France, campaigners warned.

Greenpeace protested it was “much less than was committed to”, while the Green Alliance argued it “does not live up to the government’s own ambitions”.

Mr Sunak will pledge to create thousands of green jobs in the fightback against coronavirus, with the £1bn scheme to improve energy efficiency in schools, hospitals and other public buildings.

A £50m pot will trial the retrofitting of rented social housing, installing heat pumps, insulation and double glazing in the least energy efficient properties in England.

But environmental groups were quick to draw an unfavourable comparison with plans to tackle the climate emergency while reviving the economy in Germany (£36bn) and France (£13.5bn).

And they pointed to last December’s Tory manifesto, which reads: “We will help lower energy bills by investing £9.2bn in the energy efficiency of homes, schools and hospitals”.

“Surely this is just a down payment?” said Rosie Rogers, Greenpeace UK’s head of green recovery.

“Of course this money is better than nothing, but it doesn’t measure up to the economic and environmental crises. It’s not enough to create the hundreds of thousands of new green jobs that are needed.”

Created with Sketch.
Created with Sketch.

Jo Furtado, of the Green Alliance think tank, said: “We need to see significantly more investment for a genuinely green recovery.”

“It is just over 10 per cent of the £9.2bn to 2024 that the government pledged in its manifesto for improving the energy efficiency of UK buildings.”

And Muna Suleiman, Friends of the Earth’s climate specialist, said: “If this announcement was supposed to be a bold and ambitious move towards a greener and fairer world, it seems to have massively underestimated the scale of the problem.”

The full bill for plugging the UK’s leaky buildings, which account for almost a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions, is put at nearly twice the manifesto pledge of £9.2bn, by Greenpeace.

The criticism comes just one week after the prime minister’s £5bn infrastructure spending boost, designed to head off an economic crash, lacked significant new green measures.

The independent climate change committee has called for low-carbon heating sources in all 29 million homes and buildings in the country, to rescue the legal duty to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

Last month, it recommended phasing out the installation of gas boilers by 2035 at the latest, to make homes climate-resilient.

On Wednesday, Mr Sunak will promise a £3bn package to meet Mr Johnson’s vow to “build back greener”, but no details were provided of the other measures ahead of the announcement.

He will argue more energy-efficient homes can cut annual energy bills by an average of £200 for some of the poorest households.

Source: UK Politics - www.independent.co.uk