Introduction
Ed Miliband has once again stepped forward with a dramatic pledge under Labour’s Net Zero agenda: 9.3 million heat pumps installed by 2035. It is presented as a bold environmental achievement, a modernisation of British heating, and a sign of “global climate leadership.” What it represents in practice, however, is something entirely different: a policy that cannot be delivered, not on cost, not on engineering, and not within any plausible timeline.¹This is not political rhetoric. It is arithmetic and physics. It is the unavoidable reality that no amount of slogans, targets, or legislation can escape.
The Numbers that Collapse the Entire Policy
The UK has installed just 310,000 heat pumps in total.² Miliband’s target requires the installation of nine million more in ten years, meaning the UK must fit around one heat pump every twenty seconds between now and 2035.³At present, annual installations hover around 58,000 per year.⁴ To meet the target, installation rates would need to increase seventeen-fold, overnight, with:no installer workforce of the necessary size,no manufacturing capacity at the required scale,no grid capacity to support mass electrification,and no public demand remotely close to that level.⁵The target is not ambitious.It is logistically impossible.
Electricity Prices Make Heat Pumps Unaffordable
Heat pumps only make financial sense when electricity is significantly cheaper than gas. In the UK, electricity remains roughly three times the price of gas, due to decades of Net Zero–linked surcharges, levies, and grid costs loaded onto electricity bills.⁹Even Miliband himself admitted at a Net Zero conference that he was **“wary” of telling the public heat pumps would ever be cheaper than gas boilers.**¹⁰ This admission destroys the central justification for the policy.If the running costs are higher, the market will not grow.If the market does not grow, the target is not achievable.This is basic economics, not ideology.
The £25–£67 Billion Cost to Taxpayers
The Government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme offers £7,500 per installation. If all 9.3 million heat pumps required the grant, the public cost would be £67 billion.⁶ Even using the government’s own “eligibility proportion” of around 38 per cent, the cost still lands at roughly £25 billion.⁷These figures do not include:the retrofit work needed in millions of homes,grid reinforcement costs,electricity infrastructure upgrades,public subsidies to installers,or the higher electricity bills faced by households once installed.The headline policy cost is only the beginning. The real cost—borne by taxpayers, homeowners, and billpayers—will be drastically higher.⁸
The Retrofit Reality:
Most UK Homes Are Incompatible
The UK’s housing stock,old, varied, often poorly insulated,cannot simply “switch” to heat pumps. Millions of homes would require:full insulation upgrades,new radiators capable of low-temperature heating,hot-water cylinder installations,rewiring or fuse-board upgrades,external unit placement space,pipework modifications.¹¹These retrofits routinely cost £10,000–£20,000 per property, not including the heat pump itself.You cannot “incentivise away” the laws of building physics.¹²You cannot legislate homes into being ready.
A Policy Dependent on Assumptions That Will Never Materialise
Miliband’s rollout hinges on a chain of impossible conditions:installers must multiply by an order of magnitude,electricity must become cheaper without any mechanism to make it so,homeowners must spend thousands they do not have,the grid must magically expand,retrofit costs must disappear,supply chains must appear from nowhere,and Rachel Reeves must not slash the Boiler Upgrade Scheme in the Budget.¹⁴This is not policy.This is hope disguised as planning.
The Grid Cannot Support the Electrification Required
The heat pump rollout assumes an electricity grid capable of absorbing millions of new high-demand loads. It is not. UK grid capacity is already strained by intermittent generation, connection queues, transformer shortages, and widespread curtailment of renewables.¹³Mass electrification before grid modernisation is structurally backwards. This single mis-sequencing renders the heat pump target unattainable.
Fantasy Economics in Action
What Miliband has produced is classic fantasy economics:1. Announce a heroic target.2. Ignore all evidence that it is unachievable.3. Assume the market will change because a minister said so.4. Push the true cost onto taxpayers and future governments.5. Blame external factors when delivery inevitably fails.¹⁵It is easy to announce millions of heat pumps.It is harder to deliver millions of heat pumps.In fact, under this plan. It is impossible.
Conclusion
Miliband’s heat pump policy fails every test:
economic,engineering,consumer,infrastructural,technological,and temporal.It is a proposal designed for headlines, not for homes. A policy for conference applause, not for British families. And a strategy built on numbers that do not exist and infrastructure that has not been built.The unavoidable truth is simple:This programme cannot be delivered , not on cost, not on engineering, and certainly not on time.
Footnotes
1. The 2035 target requires unprecedented annual installation rates surpassing all historical energy-transition metrics.
2. UK installation figures from industry reporting and government summaries.
3. Ten-year installation projections based on target divided by available time.
4. Annual installations from recent market data.
5. Comparison of installer availability versus required labour demand.
6. £7,500 × 9.3 million installations = £67.5 billion.
7. Application of 38% eligibility based on 2024 scheme distribution.
8. Retrofit and grid costs represent the majority of the total economic burden.
9. Electricity-to-gas price ratio derived from standing and unit costs.
10. Miliband’s admission recorded during a public Net Zero policy event.
11. Retrofit requirements for low-temperature heating systems.
12. Total cost estimates from retrofit case studies and industry assessments.
13. Grid capacity constraints well documented in connection queues and Appendix G data.
14. Budget pressures on the Boiler Upgrade Scheme widely reported.
15. Repeated pattern of Net Zero targets exceeding deliverable infrastructure.
SAY NO TO THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR LAND 
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