Will Rishi Sunak delaying electric car and gas boiler switch affect me?

Published

2 years ago

September 21, 2023

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The cost of living crisis has seen Rishi Sunak go back on some of the government’s key promises on climate change.

In a Downing Street speech on Wednesday, the prime minister announced a delay in the ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030 to 2035 and on gas boilers in all new homes from 2025 to 2035.

He also scrapped plans that would have made rental properties more energy efficient.

But with changes still years into the future – and the cost of living crisis rumbling on – will pushing deadlines back make a difference to people’s finances now? Here, Sky News takes a look.

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Live reaction to PM’s green policy changes

Petrol and diesel vehicle ban

When he was prime minister in 2020, Boris Johnson committed to banning the sale of any new petrol and diesel cars in the UK from 2030. This is now being pushed back until 2035.

Plans to fine manufacturers for each vehicle that doesn’t comply are also being watered down.

Figures show that although petrol and diesel are still the overwhelming majority – the numbers of plug-in and battery electric vehicles on UK roads have increased – by 45% and 58% respectively.

And in 2023 more electric vehicles were registered than diesel ones for the first time.

This shows a “general trend” away from internal combustion engines (ICE) – and towards more sustainable modes of transport already, says Oliver Montague, chief executive and co-founder of the e-bike engineer company Swytch.

So a change in the timing of the ban is unlikely to have much of an impact.

“Those who have to transition [to EVs] will still have to do so – they just have more time to do it,” he tells Sky News.

“The real shift will be for people who can choose how they want to get around – who aren’t already hooked to one particular mode of transport” – such as a diesel car that needs trading in.

And with the average car journey being only around eight miles – he believes many will opt for e-bikes or cycling, instead of an electric vehicle, meaning the ICE ban will have even less of an impact.

The RAC also notes the ban only covers new petrol and diesel cars, which means “a lot of people won’t be affected as the majority tend to buy used vehicles”.

Mike Childs, head of science, research and policy at Friends of the Earth, adds that people will still be able to buy non-UK manufactured EVs.

“From a consumer perspective it won’t have a great impact because they can just buy Chinese or German EVs,” he tells Sky News.

“But for British manufacturing it’s a huge backwards step and a massive shot in the foot for jobs.”

No gas boilers in new homes

Plans to stop new build properties being fitted with gas boilers beyond 2025 are being pushed back 10 years.

This doesn’t affect people who already have gas boilers, who won’t need to replace them with alternatives such as heat pumps. As a result, this change is more likely to affect developers than consumers.

Jess Ralston, energy analyst at Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, says that with a greater upfront cost for heat pumps, we won’t know until the changes come in how much of that will be passed on to buyers.

But she adds: “As time goes on heat pumps are going to be cheaper to buy and run anyway.”

Plans for all new heating systems to be low carbon by 2035, including £450m in household grants, has also been scrapped.

This means more people will have gas boilers for longer, which with prices “two to three times’ pre-crisis levels” will mean people paying more in energy bills, Ms Ralston adds.

But on Wednesday Mr Sunak did announce a 50% increase in the boiler upgrade scheme, which offers people £7,500 to help with the costs of switching from a boiler to a heat pump.

More energy efficient landlords

In 2020, Boris Johnson also pledged that from 2028 all rental properties would have to have an energy efficient rating of C or higher (A being the best and G the worst). But Mr Sunak is scrapping this due to “cost of living challenges”.

Ms Ralston says she “cannot get a single shred of logic” from the decision.

“This would reduce people’s energy bills in the cost of living crisis and increase energy security – things that the government say they want to be doing. It makes no sense whatsoever.”

Mr Childs says it will disproportionately affect people on lower incomes who are more likely to rent their homes.

“This is a massive kick in the teeth to people who live in cold, damp rented homes that are expensive to heat.

“It’s also a massive handout to landlords who can’t be bothered to insulate their properties properly,” he says.

He adds that despite some drop in prices this year, the cost of oil and gas is increasing again – and will remain volatile for as long as Russia is at war with Ukraine.

“There are more renters than there are landlords, so it makes no sense on votes. It just begs the question of whether the government are being lobbied by wealthy landlords,” Ms Ralston says.

Hydrogen levy

The government was proposing to introduce a levy of around £100 on household energy bills in 2025 – to help pay for low-carbon hydrogen production.

But after many claimed the hydrogen was being used primarily in industry – not people’s homes – ministers have scrapped it.

This is being welcomed by environmental and consumer groups.

Ms Ralston says that heat pumps are far more efficient than hydrogen for heating homes – so the government was right to recognise this wasn’t something the public should pay for.

Mr Childs adds that hydrogen still relies on natural gas – which both homes and transport have been moving away from, so Friends of the Earth has been “against it from the outset”.

UK

Britain’s winter blackout risk the lowest in six years – but ‘tight’ days expected

Published

7 hours ago

October 9, 2025

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Britain's winter blackout risk the lowest in six years - but 'tight' days expected

Britain is at the lowest risk of a winter power blackout than at any point in the last six years, the national electricity grid operator has said.

Not since the pre-pandemic winter of 2019-2020 has the risk been so low, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) said.

It’s thanks to increased battery capacity to store and deploy excess power from the likes of windfarms, and a new subsea electricity cable to Ireland that came on stream in April.

The margins between expected demand and supply are now roughly three gas power stations greater than last year, the NESO said.

It also comes as Britain and the world reached new records for green power.

For the first time, renewable energy produced more of the world’s electricity than coal in the first half of 2025, while in Britain, a record 54.5% of power came from renewables like solar and wind energy in the three months to June.

More renewable power can mean lower bills, as there’s less reliance on volatile oil and gas markets, which have remained elevated after the invasion of Ukraine and the Western attempt to wean off Russian fossil fuels.

“Renewables are lowering wholesale electricity prices by up to a quarter”, said Jess Ralston, an energy analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank.

In a recent winter, British coal plants were fired up to meet capacity constraints when cold weather increased demand, but still weather conditions meant lower supply, as the wind didn’t blow.

Those plants have since been decommissioned.

But it may not be all plain sailing…

There will, however, be some “tight” days, the NESO said.

On such occasions, the NESO will tell electricity suppliers to up their output.

The times Britain is most likely to experience supply constraints are in early December or mid-January, the grid operator said.

The NESO had been owned by National Grid, a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but was acquired by the government for £630m in 2023.

UK

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Woman accused of stalking the McCanns has outburst in court

Published

13 hours ago

October 8, 2025

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'Why are you doing this to me?' Woman accused of stalking the McCanns has outburst in court

A woman accused of stalking Madeleine McCann’s parents shouted: “Why are you doing this to me?” and was led away in tears by officers, during her trial.

Giving evidence against 24-year-old Julia Wandelt, Mrs McCann said her first contact with the Polish woman happened “about three years ago”.

Wandelt insisted that she was Madeleine, who went missing in Portugal in 2007, while stalking the missing girl’s parents by sending emails, calling them and turning up at their address, prosecutors allege.

Follow the latest updates from the trial

Wandelt is accused of one count of stalking causing serious alarm and distress to Mrs McCann and Gerry McCann between June 2022 and February this year. She denies stalking.

She is on trial with 61-year-old Karen Spragg, from Cardiff, who is accused of the same offence and also denies the offence.

Speaking from behind a blue curtain screening her from the dock at Leicester Crown Court, Mrs McCann spoke about the defendants visiting her home address in Leicestershire on 7 December last year.

Mrs McCann told the court that Wandelt had been “pleading” with her, asking why she wouldn’t agree to do a DNA test.

Spragg, who accompanied Wandelt, was “slightly more aggressive”, asking her whether she didn’t want to find her daughter, Mrs McCann added.

“I told them to leave. I told them I was distressed,” she told the court.

Asked how the incident had made her feel, Mrs McCann added: “I felt quite distressed to be honest. I think I had been on edge anyway because of the recent communications from her.”

After Mrs McCann had given her first round of evidence, Wandelt was led away from the dock after sobbing loudly and shouting: “Why are you doing this to me?”.

Mrs McCann told the jury that Wandelt had been “incessant” with her messages, which left her with a “little niggle” about doing a DNA test.

She said part of her brain was “saying ‘what if'” because of Wandelt’s frequent messages, but added: “Having seen a photo of her, she’s Polish … it doesn’t make sense.”

“I can’t say what Madeleine looks like now, but if I saw a photo of her, I would recognise her,” she said.

But she added that the “persistance” of Wandelt’s behaviour started to “get to” her, making her “almost [want] a DNA test to put it to bed”.

Asked about the impact on her between June 2022, when Wandelt first made contact, and February this year, when the 24-year-old was arrested, Mrs McCann said: “I feel like it has escalated, the level of stress and anxiety it’s caused me has increased over that time.”

She added that she has felt “more relaxed” since Wandelt’s arrest.

Gerry McCann told the court he answered the phone to Julia Wandelt on one of the many occasions that she tried to call Kate. He said he told Wandelt: “You’re not Madeleine.”

He said: “I made it very clear these were unwanted calls. To be honest, it was a bit of a blur.”

The trial continues.

UK

Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last

Published

13 hours ago

October 8, 2025

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Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last

There’s no question that Kemi Badenoch’s on the ropes after a low-energy first year as leader that has seen the Conservative Party slide backwards by pretty much every metric.

But on Wednesday, the embattled leader came out swinging with a show-stopping pledge to scrap stamp duty, which left the hall delirious. “I thought you’d like that one,” she said with a laugh as party members cheered her on.

A genuine surprise announcement – many in the shadow cabinet weren’t even told – it gave the Conservatives and their leader a much-needed lift after what many have dubbed the lost year.

Politics latest: Stamp duty to be axed under Tories

Ms Badenoch tried to answer that criticism this week with a policy blitz, headlined by her promise on stamp duty.

This is a leader giving her party some red meat to try to help her party at least get a hearing from the public, with pledges on welfare, immigration, tax cuts and policing.

In all of it, a tacit admission from Ms Badenoch and her team that as politics speeds up, they have not kept pace, letting Reform UK and Nigel Farage run ahead of them and grab the microphone by getting ahead of the Conservatives on scrapping net zero targets or leaving the ECHR in order to deport illegal migrants more easily.

Ms Badenoch is now trying to answer those criticisms and act.

At the heart of her offer is £47bn of spending cuts in order to pay down the nation’s debt pile and fund tax cuts such as stamp duty.

All of it is designed to try to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence, against a Labour Party of tax rises and a growing debt burden and a Reform party peddling “fantasy economics”.

She needs to do something, and fast. A YouGov poll released on the eve of her speech put the Conservatives joint third in the polls with the Lib Dems on 17%.

That’s 10 percentage points lower than when Ms Badenoch took power just under a year ago. The crisis, mutter her colleagues, is existential. One shadow cabinet minister lamented to me this week that they thought it was “50-50” as to whether the party can survive.

Ms Badenoch had to do two things in her speech on Wednesday: the first was to try to reassert her authority over her party. The second was to get a bit of attention from the public with a set of policies that might encourage disaffected Tories to look at her party again.

On the first point, even her critics would have to agree that she had a successful conference and has given herself a bit of space from the constant chatter about her leadership with a headline-grabbing policy that could give her party some much-needed momentum.

On the second, the promise of spending control coupled with a retail offer of tax cuts does carve out a space against the Labour government and Reform.

But the memory of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, the chaos of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and the failure of Sunak to cut NHS waiting lists or tackle immigration still weigh on the Conservative brand.

Ms Badenoch might have revived the room with her speech, but whether that translates into a wider revival around the country is very hard to read.

Ms Badenoch leaves Manchester knowing she pulled off her first conference speech as party leader: what she will be less sure about is whether it will be her last.

I thought she tacitly admitted that to me when she pointedly avoided answering the question of whether she would resign if the party goes backwards further in the English council, Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd elections next year.

“Let’s see what the election result is about,” was her reply.

That is what many in her party are saying too, because if Ms Badenoch cannot show progress after 18 months in office, she might see her party turn to someone else.