Miliband’s mad, bad energy policies have condemned us to Labour’s big freeze
- Miliband’s mad, bad energy policies have condemned us to Labour’s big freeze
The Government’s Warm Homes Plan will do little to protect us from expensive heating bills
23 January 2026 7:15am GMT
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It’s cold outside and sadly, for far too many people, it is cold inside too.
The Government has woken up to the fact that more than a million people are chittering in their own homes unable to turn their heating on due to fuel poverty. Now whose fault would that be?
If there were an Oscar for most hypocritical performance in a leading role, it would have to go to Sir Keir Starmer, whose Government’s policies have been instrumental in delivering a cold homes problem that created the need for a Warm Homes Plan in the first place.
Our Prime Minister is the arsonist returning to his own fire-raising so he may take the credit for helping put it out.
On this week’s launch of his Warm Homes Plan, he said: “A warm home shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be a basic guarantee for every family in Britain.”
Maybe he should have thought of that guarantee before he agreed to Rachel Reeves abolishing the winter fuel allowance for 10 million pensioners in 2024? The hugely unpopular policy led him to backtrack so that only three million (about a quarter) of UK pensioners are now left without heating support during this winter’s Siberian winds.
But the chief architect of Britain’s ‘cold homes plan’ is, of course, the Secretary for Energy Security and Net Zero, Edward Samuel Miliband.
Miliband is the originator of mad, bad and dangerous energy policies such as the Climate Change Act he first introduced in 2008 that is credited by some as being responsible for making the heating of homes so expensive. Miliband returned to the stage in 2024 to reprise his role of making energy, and electricity especially, more costly than anywhere else in the world.
Being personally risk-averse, Miliband takes a belt-and-braces approach to warm homes, deploying a taxpayer-subsidised heat pump in his Westminster pad but relying on a domestic gas boiler in his constituency home. Maybe he knows something we don’t.
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The Government’s Warm Homes plan will use £15bn over the next five years to provide subsidies so miraculous that heat pumps, solar panels and batteries can be more affordable to poorer households.
The plan accepts that, even after the subsidies for low-interest loans and grants, energy-efficient improvements will still likely require private funds of £5,000 per household. Supposedly, the associated savings will be £500 per year on average thereafter.
Families only need to survive Labour’s big freeze (including the freeze on tax thresholds) for 10 years to recover their outlay. Hopefully there are no servicing or maintenance costs to eat away at those estimated savings.
How families that are fuel poor will be able to afford the additional investment for new kit in the first place is not explained. In late 2024, UK electricity prices were roughly 19pc above the EU average, but still more wind power is being procured while our own gas is being left untapped.
Alternatives to the Warm Homes Plan do exist, such as my genius idea to regularly burn off all government and advisers’ estimates, reports and consultation papers at the Drax biomass plant near Miliband’s constituency of North Doncaster.
Or we could explore carbon capture of politicians’ hot air over climate change as a viable alternative energy source.
Will the Warm Homes Plan work?
The Labour Government has said it wants to create a “rooftop revolution” by tripling the number of solar panels – 68pc of those imported into Britain are manufactured in communist China.
Unfortunately for Starmer, a real and far hotter revolution is more likely to occur in this May’s council and devolved elections.
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