The Earth is warming up, and the old name for this, before ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Global climate change’, was ‘the greenhouse effect’.
Anyway, back to the conservatory tax. In fact, it wasn’t a tax, and it didn’t apply to conservatories; in typical fashion, the papers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. What had been proposed was that for major building work, such as adding an extension, the extra heating costs for the new living space would be offset by improving the insulation in the original home.
The current law requires high levels of insulation in the extension but leaves the rest of the home unchanged; this is an expensive way of doing it, and it usually means that the home’s heating bills go up significantly after an extension is added. Because a new extension is normally much smaller than the original home, reducing a home’s heating bill by improving the insulation in the original home would cost you much less than adding more and more insulation to the new extension.
So the proposed changes recognised this. They were described by some commentators, including Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs fame, as “about as sensible as sensible gets, especially when the homeowner doesn’t have to pay for those improvements.” The Government has now announced that they have dropped this proposed change. I am not a great believer in conspiracy theories, but Like Kevin, I am left wondering if there could be any truth in the suggestions of a conspiracy by the energy suppliers to protect their sales and profits.