The government is coming under mounting pressure to take action to cut electricity bills after a survey of MPs revealed widespread support across parliament.
The move would make heat pumps, which run on electricity, and electric cars, much more affordable and help the government meet its ambitious climate targets, advocates say.
The poll of a representative national sample of 111 MPs indicated that a new policy to reduce electricity bills – by removing the levies on them and raising the money from elsewhere – could well pass if it were proposed and put to a vote.
A similar plan was introduced by the Government earlier this year to remove levies for business to save up 25 per cent in costs from 2027.
The survey found that 48 per cent ‘agreed’ with the measure compared to just 17 per cent who ‘disagreed’. Meanwhile, 34 per cent said they ‘don’t know’ or ‘neither agree or disagree’, according to the poll, commissioned by Swedish heat pump company Aira and conducted by the Survation market research group.
Labour MP Bill Esterson, chair of the Energy Security and Net Zero committee, told The i Paper the concept of dropping the levies from electricity bills “appears to have widespread support”.
Aira UK Service Operations Director Matt Isherwood added: “This survey shows us that a strong number of MPs support heat pumps and cheaper electricity prices.
“It’s high time to get down to business and deliver the ‘big bang’ moment the heat pump industry, politicians, and British households have been waiting for.”
Householders are being encouraged to install heat pumps (Photo: fhm/Getty/Frank Herrmann)Advocates of lower electricity prices point out that they are artificially high at the moment as four fifths of the subsidies is used to fund renewable energy and grants to help lower income households buy loft insulation and pay their bills are levied on electricity bills – with the remainder put onto gas.
And it is a key reason why electricity currently costs about four times as much as gas for the same amount of energy – with the higher transmission and distribution costs of high-voltage electricity power lines compared to gas pipes another big factor.
The resulting disparity between electricity and gas prices in the UK is the largest in Europe.
The cost is putting many people off ditching their gas boilers in favour of electricity-run heat pumps.
But the government sees the switch from fossil-fuel burning gas boilers to heat pumps powered by green energy as central to its mission to make the UK’s power system virtually net zero by 2030.
As such, it has no choice but to make electricity cheaper by taking the levies off electricity bills and moving them onto gas bills or into general taxation, advocates say. Putting them on to gas bills would be more effective because it would make gas more expensive, as well as electricity cheaper, further encouraging people to switch from boilers to heat pumps, they argue.
‘A quick win’
“My committee has heard evidence that moving levies from electricity bills and onto gas would deliver a small but significant reduction in electricity bills for consumers,” Mr Esterson said.
“We could achieve a quick win by reducing the policy costs currently on electricity relative to gas,” he added.
“And the more we switch to wind, solar, nuclear and long term electricity storage, the more control we will have over the supply and the cost of our energy.”
Dr James Richardson, chief analyst at the Climate Change Committee, the government’s official climate change adviser, told The i Paper: “Making electricity cheaper is our top recommendation to the UK Government.
“Our analysis shows that removing costly levies from electricity bills would ensure that households could save money through running costs due to the greater efficiency of heat pumps compared to fossil fuel boilers.”
Jess Ralston, head of Energy, Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) research group, told The i Paper: “Artificially high electricity prices are holding back the transition to clean technologies like heat pumps which lower our dependence on expensive foreign gas.”
“Re-balancing levies would cut bills for millions of households ahead of more bill rises expected in October, improve energy security, and stop foreign actors like Putin from being able to influence our bills.”
The typical household energy bill is expected to rise by £17 to £1,737 per year when Ofgem’s new price cap come into force in October, analysts at Cornwall Insight have predicted.
The new price cap is set to be confirmed next Wednesday, 27 August.
The energy price cap covers 22 million households and is set every three months by Ofgem(Photo: monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images/iStockphoto)Households will be charged £17 more for a typical annual bill from October as the energy price cap is due to rise, according to consultants Cornwall Insight.The government has not formally proposed cutting levies from electricity bills but told The i Paper “we are exploring a range of options for rebalancing gas and electricity prices”.
“The British people are showing record demand for heat pumps and we are one of the fastest growing markets in Europe,” a Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said.
“We will also repair our retail energy market and ensure people have the best possible support to choose more affordable, smarter, clean energy that is right for them.”
Heat pump installations jumped by 63 per cent to nearly 100,000 in 2024, helped by a £7,500 government grant available to most households.
But even at this elevated level sales were well short of the Government’s target of 600,000 heat pump installations per year by 2028 – and the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation of heat pumps in 10 per cent of UK households by 2030 remains a challenging goal.
Heat pump sales in the UK are the lowest in Europe per household, with Britons purchasing fewer than a tenth as many per household as Norwegians.
The poll
The question: Thinking about your constituents’ energy bills, to what extent do you agree or disagree that removing levies from electricity bills would help to make electric heating systems, such as heat pumps, a more affordable alternative to gas boilers across the UK?
Don’t know – 19%Strongly disagree – 3%Tend to disagree – 14%Neither agree nor disagree – 15%Tend to agree – 41%Strongly agree – 7%
NET: Agree (48%)NET: Disagree (17%)
The study revealed a stark polarity of views among MPs, with opposition to removing levies on electricity bills driven predominantly by Liberal Democrats – 58 per cent disagree – compared with 22 per cent of Conservative MPs and only 10 per cent of Labour MPs.
Overall, 15 per cent said that they would need to learn more about the benefits of cheaper electricity before backing the policy change.
Data is weighted by party, region, age, gender, length of service, new/returning (at the last general election) and marginality of seat to make it representative of the House of Commons as a whole. Research conducted Summer 2025: 20th May – 17th June.
The 111 MPs comprised 69 from Labour, 21 Conservative, 12 Lib Dem, 9 from the other parties.
The poll was conducted by Survation for the Aira heat pump company.
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