Boris Johnson and the Great Price Freeze Panic

In the wake of Ed Miliband’s announcement about an energy price freeze, Mayor of London Boris Johnson took the opportunity to use his regular column in the Telegraph to boast about his own energy policies. It’s extraordinary because the Mayor’s policies cannot be lauded as anything other than an embarrassing failure.

Boris recounts a meeting many years before with Ed Miliband in which the Mayor set out plans for his RE:NEW domestic energy efficiency programme: “I was interested in the plan as a way of helping the planet and helping people in tough times”.

My first response on reading this? Who knew the Mayor was interested in “helping the planet”? Only in January of this year he said on critiques of climate change: “But it doesn’t seem as nuts as it did five years ago. I look at the snowy waste outside, and I have an open mind”. The Mayor’s commitment to climate change and one must assume his programmes to tackle it were put at risk by a few mildly snowy days in January.

But whilst the Mayor continues to ponder the more obtuse critiques of widely accepted climate science let’s focus for a moment on what the Mayor’s policies on domestic home efficiency have really achieved.

The RE:NEW programme is the Mayor’s principle vehicle for retro-fitting homes to cut fuel poverty and help meet the 60% Co₂ reduction target. By May last year it had delivered less than half of the planned 200,000 homes retrofitted. The current figure is reported to stand at 84,000. That’s hardly a record to be proud of.

If the Mayor is really so proud of his RE:NEW programme and the money it is saving Londoners on their energy bills why the deathly silence when I asked the Mayor back in June how much Londoners were really saving?

With the Mayor failing to deliver, Londoners have been left to rely on the very energy companies that are increasing their bills to deliver home retro-fits as part of the Energy Company Obligation. Are they delivering on their obligations? Unfortunately, no. Indeed, the Mayor is establishing a Memorandum of Understanding with companies to make sure they do better. We will see if this light touch approach makes a difference.

That just leaves us with the Government’s Green Deal Programme, widely regarded as a national joke. Recent press reports suggest nine months since the rollout of the Green Deal, only 132 people were “in the process” of getting energy efficiency measures installed and one had “gone live” meaning improvement works could begin. If the government wants to meet its target of insulating 14 million homes by 2020 the pace of delivery will need to substantially increase.

Boris Johnson gets very upset when fellow politicians appear “uninterested” in him tackling climate change. That’s the climate change he believes in less every time it snows. Perhaps that’s because the few schemes he does have in place to bring down emissions can’t be taken seriously as they have made very little impact, and they are made by a man who publicly jokes about global warming. Personally I’m hoping for a snow-free winter, otherwise Boris might deny climate change completely.

Murad Qureshi is a member of the London Assembly