The Energy and Utilities Alliance has expressed concern that quotas for heat pump sales, rumoured to be in the government’s long-awaited Heat and Buildings Strategy, will cause a loss of British jobs and an influx of cheap foreign imports being dumped on UK consumers.
The Heat and Buildings Strategy is set to include a legal obligation called ‘The Market Mechanism’, backed up by penalties if UK boiler manufacturers fail to sell a Whitehall-set target number of heat pumps.
Mike Foster, chief executive of the Energy and Utilities Alliance, voiced his members’ concerns that quotas will simply suck in cheap foreign imports, risking the very policy they are meant to support.
He said: “Anecdotally, we hear of Chinese heat pump manufacturers approaching UK firms with a view to selling cheap appliances to badge and meet the Whitehall-imposed production quota.
“Our members, who are facing a financial penalty if they don’t supply the market with enough heat pumps to satisfy the Whitehall bureaucrats, may end up bringing these cheap imports into the UK or paying a fine if they don’t. It is the most un-Conservative industrial policy I have ever seen.
“We will see innovative and successful British industry penalised because Whitehall officials are so desperate to reach a target for heat pump sales, they fail to see the bigger picture. Ministers are complicit in this. The pain will be felt in places like Preston, Hull, Derbyshire and Worcester.”