This time last year, former prime minister Liz Truss's “mini” Budget sent interest rates soaring, thereby compounding the pain the housing market was already feeling due to rising rates. One year later, her predecessor also wants to shake up the housing market – albeit Rishi Sunak’s approach is at least intentional.
In a speech last week, the prime minister moved the deadline for the phase-out of gas boilers in new homes from 2025 to 2035 and scrapped planned energy efficiency targets for rental properties.
This is bad news for the climate and the whole housing market. Sunak presented the phase-out of gas boilers as saving homeowners money. That may be true, but it looks more like the government avoiding hard work. In 2020, it pledged £1.5bn in order to fund the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps. This was abandoned a year later, with the National Audit Office blaming rushed implementation, delays and a lack of certified tradespeople able to do the work. The government has since replaced that scheme with other, less ambitious ones.