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Showing posts with label People And Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label People And Nature. Show all posts
People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani..

24-August-2026


 A Ukrainian court this month found Bohdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist, guilty of high treason and jailed him for 15 years – solely for words he wrote about the war.

This assault on free speech should be challenged, otherwise the decision could turn out to be the thin end of the wedge.

The court, in Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv region, south eastern Ukraine, convicted 27-year-old Syrotiuk on the basis of texts published on the World Socialist Web Site.

Bohdan Syrotiuk. Photo: Intent / social media

The judgement asserted, without foundation, that the texts supported the Russian war effort and subverted Ukrainian statehood.

The court’s conclusions are overwhelmingly political, stating that Syrotiuk’s articles:

delegitimised the political leadership of Ukraine and denied the democratic processes at work in Ukraine” and, with reference to the Bandera movement, “devalued national heroes, historical national figures of Ukraine, turning them into criminals.

While this judgement is especially severe, it is part of a broader repressive trend against which human rights advocates and others are speaking out.[1]

To clarify the dangerous nature of the judgement, I have summarised it below. Here are three points, by way of introduction.

First. The context for this judgement, and other human rights abuses, is a defensive war that Ukraine has been forced to wage by an imperialist aggressor, Russia – a war in which the deaths and injuries are counted in hundreds of thousands, and the destruction wrought overwhelmingly on Ukraine’s civilian population is incalculable.

The scale of the attacks in Ukraine on human rights, including the freedom of speech, can in no way be compared, quantitately or qualitatively, with the orgy of repression by the Russian state that has accompanied its offensive war. The Russian regime kills or jails all who make the slightest protest against the war. Russia’s tinpot dictatorships in the occupied areas of Ukraine, not far from Mykolaiv, are especially savage.[2]

In the bigger scheme of things, Syrotiuk could be seen as a victim of this war. But the war does not excuse, justify or minimise the blow against free speech struck by his conviction.

Second, calling for this conviction to be overturned does not mean endorsing Syrotiuk’s politics, his distorted view of the war’s causes, or the campism of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, of which he is a member. (See citations from his articles below.) One does not have to accept his arguments to understand that they can not be characterised as treasonable.

Punishing these views with a prison sentence deters everyone’s freedom of speech, not just Syrotiuk’s.

Third, it is Syrotiuk’s misfortune that his case has been taken up by the WSWS, a divisive sect whose activities are often damaging to the labour movement and to internationalism.

The WSWS campaign in defence of Syrotiuk – directed more at providing their supporters with a martyr to pity than at building a case for his release – may not help him.

It began with an exaggerated denunciation of Ukraine as “fascistic”, which does indeed chime with Kremlin narratives, linked with a bizarre assertion that repression is more severe in Ukraine than in Russia.

Attention can be drawn to Syrotiuk’s case, and the implicit danger to free speech, without reference to, or involvement with, these political freeloaders.

The threat carried by the judgement is not to them, but in the first place to Ukrainian socialists, including the majority of socialists who recognise Ukraine’s war as just and, in many cases, participate actively in the war effort. For example, Maksym Shumakov, an organiser of the student union Priama Diia, currently faces the threat of prosecution under Ukraine’s “decommunisation” laws. (Details here in Ukrainian.)

But the threat goes wider than that: if unchallenged, the Pervomaisk court’s decision endangers the free speech of trade unionists, students and all in Ukrainian civil society who – even in difficult wartime conditions – insist on the right to question and challenge government decisions.

That right is central to the democracy for which so many Ukrainians believe they are fighting.

What Syrotiuk has been convicted of

The conviction is under Article 111.2 of the criminal code, high treason, defined as “an act wilfully committed by a citizen of Ukraine to the detriment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defence capability, and state, economic or information security of Ukraine: joining the enemy under martial law or armed conflict, espionage, assistance in subversive activities against Ukraine provided to a foreign state, a foreign organisation or their representatives”.[3] Paragraph 2 states that, under martial law, the sentence is 15 years to life, rather than 12-15 years as stated in paragraph 1.

The court judgement refers as proof of guilt only to articles published on the World Socialist Web Site, and Syrotiuk’s part in writing, translating, circulating them or being quoted in them.

Towards the end of the court decision, the court summarises. It says that four of the articles cited in evidence express “non-recognition of the presence in Ukraine of a legitimate and internationally recognised political leadership, based on the majority of the citizens of Ukraine”; the articles seek to “delegitimise the political leadership of Ukraine and deny the democratic processes at work in Ukraine, particularly since 2013” and “deny the existence of the state in internationally recognised borders, including retrospectively”. The articles also “deny the unilateral status of the Russian Federation as the aggressor state with respect to Ukraine” and claim this is “linked to the assertion of the absence of the Ukrainian state’s right to independent decision-making and the subordination of Ukrainian state power to foreign powers, especially the USA”. The articles “compare Ukrainian citizens with fascists and Nazis from the time of the second world war”, and they “devalue national heroes, historical national figures of Ukraine, turning them into criminals”.

The court then refers to the expertise brought before it, and concludes that the prosecution has proved its case, with the single exception of charges brought with respect to the article “The military is grabbing draft evaders everywhere”. It adds that there are no mitigating circumstances, and sentences Syrotiuk to 15 years’ imprisonment with confiscation of property.

The court decision

The court decision is published on a state repository of documents. The text describes the prosecution case, the defence case and the judges’ conclusions. It is the sole primary source of information about the hearing that I have been able to access.

Firefighters in Pervomaisk tackling damage from Russian bombing, August 2024.
Photo: Ukrainian National News

The prosecution case consists mainly of citations from Bohdan Syrotiuk’s articles (see below). In addition to these, the prosecution presented to the court a letter from the Centre for Countering Disinformation of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine that it claimed proved that the WSWS was an “information agency of communist orientation” that “circulated pro-Russian narratives, connected to Russian military aggresion against Ukraine”. The Centre found seven articles written or circulated by Syrotiuk that included “fragments, statements, assertions and phrases that indicated approval of” Russian military action, and thereby harmed Ukraine’s state and information security.

Both prosecution and defence presented linguistic expert analysis of the articles, that reached broadly opposite conclusions. The court then asked the Odessa Institute of Jurisprudential Scientific Research to examine the articles. The experts there found not only “fragments, statements, assertions and phrases that indicated approval of” Russian military action, but also “non-recognition of the presence of an elected leadership in Ukraine”; “contempt and ridicule” of Ukraine’s political leadership; “the transformation of heroes and historical figures into criminals”; denial of Ukraine’s democratic processes and of the Ukrainian population’s control over government; “negative evaluation” of the Ukrainian armed forces; and denial of the existence of the Ukrainian state.

The judgement repeatedly, when referring to Syrotiuk, adds the adjectival phrase “acting to implement the directions of representatives of a foreign organisation, realising his subversive intention and preliminary criminal agreement with other members of the organisation he leads, the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists”.

The defence argument in court

The court judgement states that, at the hearing, Syrotiuk “denied his guilt of the crimes for which he is incriminated. He refused to make a statement or answer questions. When speaking in debate, he emphasised that he is a Ukrainian patriot and an opponent of the ‘Putin regime’. He said that he condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and denied any intent to betray the state. He denied having caused harm to the state and information security of Ukraine, and denied that he had given assistance to a foreign organisation in undertaking subversive activities against Ukraine. He stated that he is a socialist by conviction, and that the World Socialist Web Site, on which he had published articles, is published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its editorial activity is conducted not in Russia but in the USA.”

The court judgement recorded that the defence lawyer said that Syrotiuk was accused of treason, by means of giving help to a foreign organisation and its representatives in undertaking subversive activity against Ukraine. Under Article 17 of the Ukrainian criminal code, the burden of proof of the existence of such a foreign organisation, and its subversive intentions, lay on the prosecution – and there was no such proof in the case file. No evidence had been produced that a relevant structure lay behind the World Socialist Web Site; no evidence, either, of intention to undertake subversive activity. The case relied entirely on analysis of publications on the internet. The requirements of the criminal code Articles 84, 85 and 86 regarding proof had not been met; neither had the Article 62 of the Constitution, that states that criminal prosecution can not be based on presumption.

The defence lawyer (as reported in the court judgement) pointed out that, in the publications used in evidence, there were no calls to subvert national security, to liquidate Ukrainian statehood, to destroy Ukrainian identity, to undertake subversive activity, to overthrow the constitutional order or seize the state’s borders, or to seize the state’s borders by military aggression. There was no propaganda advocating war or the breaching of the foundations of Ukrainian national security in the information sphere. “The overwhelming majority of the court expert’s conclusions in the criminal case are evaluations of political, historical, ideological and other public statements, which are themselves protected by Article 10 of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms [commonly known as the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Ukraine is a signatory].”

The articles Syrotiuk wrote

Of the articles written by Syrotiuk under pseudonyms, or quoting him, on the WSWS web site, one that summarises his view of the war is a May Day greeting he gave to an on-line meeting in 2023. He said:

This war was unleashed by US imperialism, NATO, and the Putin regime. It is an imperialist war, waged not in the interests of the proletariat of Russia, Ukraine and America but in the interests of capital in these countries. This war is the result of capitalism, a system stricken with a deadly disease. In anticipation of its impending death and bristling with weapons of mass destruction, capitalism is digging a grave for all living things, to bury them before they bury it.
Is it true that all the people of Ukraine support this war? My answer is: No! The claim that all Ukrainians support this war is a brazen lie. The main prop for this war is not the proletariat and the Ukrainian population, whose situation is appalling. The main prop for this war are the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists and those they serve.
We, the orthodox Trotskyists of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, do not support this war, either in Ukraine or in Russia.
Yes, there are those in Ukraine who sincerely believe that American imperialism can stop this war. They believe that the weapons supplied to the regime established by the 2014 coup d’état and now represented by Zelensky can lead Ukraine to victory and end this war.
But in fact, US imperialism is fuelling this war and inciting a third world imperialist war. The fomenting of this third imperialist war involves not only America, NATO countries and the Kyiv regime represented by Zelensky but also the bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists, who serve these regimes. These forces call themselves supporters and ideological followers of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They have unleashed terror against the people and national and political genocide on the territory of western Ukraine. They have sowed death, fear, grief and tears on Ukrainian soil. They have poured blood into peasant huts and filled wells with corpses.

Another article referred to prominently in the court decision, “The crimes of the Banderovites”, published in April 2023, stated:

The Nazi accomplices of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and their leaders were involved in many crimes, including against the Ukrainian people. Yet today, to many in Ukraine, their ominous names are not synonymous with criminals, but with the names of national heroes. Streets, stadiums and cafes are named after them, and monuments are erected in their honour throughout the country.

Syrotiuk then questioned the Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalist” assertion that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was never a legitimate state. He referred to the civil war of the late 1940s and concluded:

Today, just as then, the crimes of those who call themselves the ideological successors and followers of Bandera are almost too numerous to count. Like then, they are a bloody pack of jackals in the service of capital, running from one capitalist to another. But in changing their paymasters, they do not change their essence. There is nothing but backwardness and animal hatred in their faces and minds. Their ideas are reactionary.
Yet these very ideas of Bandera are today promoted not only by the imperialists and the bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists who want to justify the crimes of OUN-UPA, but also by those who call themselves Ukrainian national-communists, who want to justify all these horrors, by claiming that all this was caused by the policy pursued by Stalin in Western Ukraine.

In my view, these two passages summarise the key political points expressed in other ways in Syrotiuk’s other articles; these include nothing more “pro Russian” than what is cited here.[4] Readers can check the World Socialist Web Site for themselves.

Some incidental points

🔴 The court judgement mentions that Syrotiuk was in contact with citizens of the Russian Federation, presumably members of a Trotskyist organisation there also linked to the WSWS. The judgement also mentions once, in passing, in the prosecution’s description of Syrotiuk’s contact with the WSWS, that he received a monthly payment for his work. Friends have asked whether this might indicate that Syrotiuk was, knowingly or unknowingly, being funded by Russia. My view is that:

The investigating officers were aware that Syrotiuk was paid. It beggars belief that they did not look into the source of these funds, and that the prosecutors did not attach significance to it, if they thought these payments might have come from Russia. The court has not found Syrotiuk guilty of being in the pay of any foreign organisation. It was not mentioned in the summing-up. The court was concerned solely with words spoken, written or circulated by Syrotiuk.

Whether we like it or not (I don’t), the world is full of so-called socialist organisations in rich countries who fund or partly fund activity by their fellow thinkers outside the rich world, for motives that I view as ranging from good to terrible. It beggars belief that the Russian state would be stupid enough to fund the WSWS, or that the WSWS would be stupid enough to accept that funding. In any case, Syrotiuk would have known nothing about such arrangements. Speculation about this can only take us away from the reality: Syrotiuk has been found guilty of treason solely for his words.

🔴 The officers investigating Syrotiuk’s case searched a basement in a Pervomaisk apartment block that they described as “non-residential”. They found a rucksack, a cigarette lighter, some sweatshirts, a jacket, epaulettes and shoulder patches – all bearing Russian state symbols, and a gas mask.

There was no mention of these things in the court’s summary of the proceedings. There is no indication that they belonged to Syrotiuk. They appear in the court record only in a list of items – presumably judged to be irrelevant – that the court ordered to be destroyed.

Intent magazine, in one of the few English-language articles published about the hearing, described this stuff as “military equipment”, which is stretching a point. Uninformed speculation by social media users inevitably followed. But these items played no part in the court proceedings. Again, speculation about them takes us away from the reality: Syrotiuk has been found guilty of treason solely for his words.

Note. For those who don’t know me, and want to know my view of the war, I gave it e.g. in 2014 (here and here) and 2022 (here and here).

Note, 25 August 2026. This article has been corrected to clarify that the court is in Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv region (not Mykolaiv city).

References

[1] Human rights groups in Ukraine warn of arbitrary punishment of people accused of collaboration with Russia, illegally enforced conscription, victimisation of anti-corruption campaigners and censorious application of “decommunisation” laws

[2] Reports giving overviews of political repression in Russia are published regularly by OVD-Info and Memorial: Support Political Prisoners. See also Chapter 14 of Voices Against Putin’s War

[3] The Ukrainian parliament’s web site displays the criminal code and an English translation

[4] The Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists was set up in February 2018, defining itself as fighting for “the truth about Lev Davidovich Trotsky”, against Stalinism, and “various forms of petty bourgeois nationalist and anti-Marxist politics”. Syrotiuk shifted towards Trotskyism from Stalinism. He became politically active as a teenager in 2014-15, in the youth organisation of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In May 2015 Syrotiuk, then 16 years old, in a speech at a school lesson, blamed “the USA and our home-made oligarchs” for the armed conflict that began in 2014, earning praise from the CPU – which was banned, in the same year, for supporting the armed assault on Ukraine by the Russian-backed separatists

🔴 On Tuesday 29 September, at 7.0pm, Fare Free London is holding an event on “How to Make Public Transport Free”, at the Golden Lane community centre, London EC1Y 0SA. We will hear from councillor Julie Frêche of the Montpellier metropolitan area in France, where public transport has been free since 2023, and hold our annual meeting. All welcome! See details and register here.

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Jail Sentence For Ukrainian Trotskyist Is An Assault On Free Speech

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.. Reposted from the Fare Free London site.
 
20-August-2026


This summer’s heat waves have hammered home the reality of climate change, and highlighted, again, the gulf between the government’s timid efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and what scientists say are needed.

We desperately need policies that simultaneously point the way to reduce emissions, and address the cost-of-living crisis and the other miseries inflicted on people by crisis-ridden capital and its pliant politicians. Without such an approach, to galvanise collective responses, we are left with despair at the scale of the problem on one hand, or hopelessly inadequate gesture politics on the other.

Transforming the cities we live in is a key part of this, and public transport is one of the key issues. Making it free would empower people who live in cities – and help to slash emissions, by moving away from car-centred transport systems. So here, as input to discussions about climate action, is a recent article reposted from the Fare Free London site. Simon Pirani.

Free bus travel is making a world of difference to under-22s in Scotland, opening access to jobs, education and social life – but privately-owned transport companies are creaming off profits from the scheme.
At Govan bus station in Glasgow, a statue honouring Mary Barbour, an early
20th century socialist and city councillor, who supported rent strikes and campaigned
for welfare services. Photo: Alan Murray-Rust / wikimedia commons

Campaigners in Scotland are calling for public ownership and control, to stop exploitative over-charging and poor service by the private companies.

We could learn from Scotland’s success with free public transport, while avoiding the nightmares brought on by privatisation, Fare Free London says.

Free bus travel for the under-22s was introduced by the Scottish government on 31 January 2022. More than 300 million bus journeys have been taken by 838,900 young people who have the National Entitlement Card that you need to use the scheme.

The benefits were spelled out in a report by Young Scot, a charity, which surveyed more than 650 22-25 year olds who had benefited from the scheme up until their 22nd birthday.

🚌 More than 91% of survey respondents said the scheme had increased their access to work, education and leisure;

🚌 Free bus travel helped improve young people’s independence, confidence and financial stability;

🚌  Focus groups run by Young Scot highlighted the positive impact on mental health, reducing isolation and increasing social participation.

One survey respondent said:

I’m from a low-income family. Sometimes I would use the lunch money my mum gave me to get the bus. … My sister is 13 and now she has the free bus travel. I am so happy for her that she doesn’t need to make that choice.

Another said free travel gave them:

a sense of independence and adventure – no matter where you were, you knew you wouldn’t have to worry about the travel cost.

And a third said:

It drastically improved my mental health, and social life, as it meant I was not worried about spending too much on travel.

After their 22nd birthday, scheme respondents used buses more than other travel modes, with 52% taking five or more bus journeys per week.

But car usage increased: while still on the scheme, only 4% of people used a car five or more times per week, but after it, 25% did.

Young Scot’s report also showed that the scheme influenced how people chose to travel.

Nearly two thirds of respondents (63%) now consider public transport more often in their decision making, and more respondents used active travel – walking, wheeling and cycling – after reaching their 22nd birthday.

In Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, where bus fares are extremely expensive – more than £3 each for many journeys – there has been a big ramp-up in cycling infrastructure.

The city council has committed to build 270 kilometres of segregated bike lanes, of which they are now promising 50 km by 2030.

The age limits on the free buses scheme is one obvious problem. Paul Shaw of Better Buses for Strathclyde, a coalition campaigning for franchising and public ownership, said: “As things stand, your 22nd birthday is a cliff edge. All of a sudden you could be paying more than £6 for two journeys, or £12 for four journeys – patterns that are quite common for people to get to work and back.”

The prospect of free public transport for all has been discussed by Glasgow City Council. In 2024 it commissioned a report that made a strong case for it. A pilot scheme followed – an unambitious model, offering free passes to 1000 residents for seven weeks. Any assessment of that has not yet been made public.

Meanwhile, national legislation has opened the door to local authorities outside London getting a foothold for publicly-owned bus services, by setting up municipally owned bus companies.

In Scotland, private ownership of bus companies has actually stopped the free-fares scheme reaching its potential, Paul Shaw argues.

This is due to the way the free travel is paid for. The bus companies charge the Scottish government for the cost of the fare, at a pre-agreed percentage of an adult single fare for the same journey.

In 2025-26, for older and disabled users, the bus companies charged 52.9% of a single fare, for a young person aged 16-21, 72.4%, and for 5-15 year olds, 47.9%.

That means, for example, that if a 16-year old takes four journeys in a day, the operator First Bus is paid £9.40 by the Scottish government (four times 72.4% of an adult single).

“This is despite the fact a First Bus all-day ticket is £6.30”, Paul wrote in a recent substack post. Does that make First Bus no worse off? “That sounds quite a bit better off if you ask me.”

If that 16-year old is travelling with their grandma, and a younger sibling, First Bus would collect £22.49 from the government – while two adults and one child all-day tickets would cost just £15.70.

Paul Shaw wrote:

This system incentivises the operators to design bus routes which requires passengers to take more than one bus per journey – and since it is tied to the cost of an adult single fare, it keeps those high . . . This is why two singles are more expensive than an all-day ticket.

Bus fares – and political attitudes to them – are changing nationwide. The cost of living crisis, and war-related fuel price increases, are forcing rethinking all round. Andy Burnham has ordered a £2 bus fare cap in England. Millions of school-aged children have been offered free travel deals over the summer by local authorities.

In London, where we already have public control of bus services – which are franchised to operators by TfL – many of the problems suffered by the under-22s scheme in Scotland can be avoided from the start.

On the other hand, we have a two-tier public transport system, with relatively cheap bus fares (capped, for now, at £1.75 for a single adult journey) and some of the most expensive tube fares in the world.

Fare Free London says it is time for the Mayor to look at the options for TfL, including the universal free public transport that we favour, and any number of steps towards it.

□ On Tuesday 29 September, at our public event, “How to make public transport free”, we will consider our next campaigning steps. All welcome – just register on eventbrite.

The event, at 7.0pm at the Golden Lane community centre in the Barbican, and on line, will hear a talk by Julie Frêche, vice-president for transport and mobility of the Montpellier metropolitan area in France, which introduced universal free public transport in 2023.

🔴Linked article: Effective taxes on wealth could fund abolition of bus fares

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Free Buses Open Doors For Scotland’s Under-22s 🚌 But Privatisation Undermines Scheme

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.. Reposted from the Fare Free London web site.

20-August-2026

The government could make all bus journeys in the UK free, at a cost of about £5.6 billion per year, a report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) shows.

That £5.6 billion is less than one-eighth of the £50 billion that tax justice campaigners say could be raised each year by taxing wealth more effectively.

Fare Free London joined a picket of the department of energy last month, organised by
Fuel Poverty Action, demanding action on energy bills and the cost of living

The NEF report, Getting Moving on the Cost of Living, shows that bus and rail fares have risen faster than the rate of inflation over the last 25 years, and “a high, and growing, level of car dependency has resulted”.

That leaves households “exposed to the high costs of car ownership, particularly when fuel prices spike”. And so transport is the largest expense, excluding mortgage payments, for rural households, and the second largest for urban households.

“Universal public transport provision can be one of the most foundational and transformative approaches to addressing inequality”, authors Paula Castro Rodriguez and Alex Chapman argue. It is “also key to a fast green transition”.

The report’s authors looked at three policy options aimed at cutting the cost of bus travel: free bus travel for all, a £1 fare cap, and free bus travel for under-25s. They also checked on the cost of a £1 fare cap plus free travel for under-25s.

They argue that a big expansion of bus services would be needed, reversing the drastic cuts of the last few decades.

Their projections assumed that abolishing fares would produce 884 million new journeys in the first year, and more than double that in the long term; that more than 15,000 new buses would be put on the road; and that bus users of all ages would save £110 per year on average; young people’s savings would be greater, at least £150 per year.

Such a scheme would cost the government an estimated £4.3 billion in the first year and £5.6 billion per year after that, the report says.

Among those who would benefit most directly from free bus travel are young people, the NEF report says. They are “particularly exposed to the transport cost of living”, with the high cost of car ownership pushing it out of reach for many.

Young people need mobility to access work and education opportunities.

Schemes in Scotland, and around the world, show that free, or ultra-cheap, public transport can open up opportunities for young people and support them into good work.

We in Fare Free London believe that, if the government was committed to free public transport, it would find the money somehow.

It is not hard to raise it by taxing wealth, for example – and, given the gigantic leap forward that it would be for social justice and climate action, well worth it.

Think about the £5.6 billion a year that NEF reckons free buses would cost. That is less than one-eighth of the £50 billion per year that the government could raise by “closing unfair loopholes and implementing credible, achievable reforms”, identified in a recent report by Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires.

“The UK’s unequal tax system is stacked in favour of the super-rich”, the report says:

Unfair loopholes and far lower rates of tax on income from wealth than work mean the wealthiest in our society often pay proportionally lower taxes than the average person.

The two groups propose a 2% tax on assets over £10 million (to raise up to £24 billion a year); reforms to the Capital Gains Tax to close loopholes (£11.3 billion a year); extending National Insurance to non-dividend investment income and partnership income (£6.1 billion a year); and other measures.

Other tax campaign groups have come up with similar numbers. The Taxing Wealth Report showed how £90 billion could be raised each year from straightforward reforms to the existing tax system, focused only on those who earn money from investment or rents.

Just putting a charge analogous to national insurance on investment income would close a tax avoidance loophole and raise £18 billion, the report’s author Richard Murphy writes.

The research group Positive Money says £12.5 billion could have been raised this year, just by a windfall tax on the four largest banks.

And all the tax justice campaign groups say that money invested in reducing cross-border tax evasion would bring handsome results. The UK loses about £33.5 billion a year that way, the Tax Justice Network reckons.

🔴 On Tuesday 29 September, at 7.0pm, Fare Free London is holding an event on “How to Make Public Transport Free”, at the Golden Lane community centre, London EC1Y 0SA. We will hear from councillor Julie Frêche of the Montpellier metropolitan area in France, where public transport has been free since 2023, and hold our annual meeting. All welcome! See details and register here.

☭ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

Effective Taxes On Wealth Could Fund Abolition Of Bus Fares

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani. 


The government’s Local Power Plan will fail to boost community renewable energy projects if regulatory and market obstructions are not swept away, campaigners say.

An obsessively centralised system of regulation, and the energy corporations’ power, are blocking change, some activists argue.

Even modest proposals to support community energy projects with a long-term, fixed price for their electricity fall on deaf ears.

A site visit preparing an area-based retrofit scheme in south Manchester.
Carbon Co-op works as an intermediary party on the scheme

And while the government says it wants to make it easy for community projects to supply local customers directly, it has shied away from scrapping the multiple obstacles to them doing so.

A deeper-going shake-up, to facilitate local microgrids, is at least being talked about – but is even further away from implementation.

Community energy representatives say that, if projects are stuck in years-long queues for a connection to the electricity grid, the government can wave goodbye to its commitment to expand community energy renewable generation capacity nearly 20-fold, to 8 gigawatts by 2030.

The House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero (ESNZ) committee said last month [June] that the Local Power Plan “risks failing”. The MPs were “not convinced” the government would hit the 8GW by 2030 target.

It is best to assess the government’s actions in relation not only to its own targets, but to community energy’s potential both to combat social injustice and to make a substantial contribution to tackling climate change.

That potential could be realised most effectively by taking electricity networks into public, cooperative and municipal forms of ownership, and by prioritising decentralised renewables technologies and flexible throughput.

The Local Power Plan could be a battleground on which progress is made on both counts.

The gap between words and actions

The Local Power Plan, published in February, promises to “accelerate the build-out of clean power” in communities, through up to £1 billion of investment between now and 2030 in “grants, loans, advice, expert help and more”.

The government claims the funding – partly through a new state-owned company, GB Energy – will reduce electricity bills, “transform communities” and “create jobs”.

There are about 700 community energy projects in the UK with generation capacity of 440 megawatts (MW), or 0.44 gigawatts (GW). The government’s Clean Power Action Plan includes the target of 8GW of new renewable community electricity generation by 2030 – but no details about how to achieve it.

Community energy groups say this aim will be frustrated by the grid connection crisis, constraints on selling energy locally, the lack of a guaranteed price from the big market players, and other regulatory failures.

The biggest obstacle to new projects is the near-impossibility of getting a grid connection, without which electricity can not be generated. 379 MW of electricity generation capacity, that would almost double total output from community schemes, is “stalled by grid delays and outdated policy”, a coalition of 250 organisations complained in an open letter to the government.

The years-long queue for grid connections is a national scandal that also affects big commercially-operated renewables. The lack of transmission capacity, especially between Scotland and England, means that wind farms in Scotland are paid to stop working, while gas-fired power stations in England are ramped up, a damning report by Carbon Tracker showed.

It is a story of neoliberalism and underinvestment: in the decade 2014-2023, the deployment of solar and wind quadrupled, but investment in the transmission grid stayed flat, and after 2017 decreased.

In the financial year 2024-25, the National Energy System Operator (NESO), that runs the grid, paid £2.7 billion in balancing costs – mostly compensation for switching off wind farms. In 2024, Scotland’s largest wind farm, Seagreen, was paid £65 million to restrict output 71% of the time.

In December last year, NESO addressed a related scandal by reforming the grid connection queue to throw out speculative and “zombie” projects, for which companies requested a connection, but which might never go ahead.

A ship loading jackets for the Seagreen offshore windfarm at Nigg Energy Park.
Seagreen’s output was curtailed 71% of the time in 2024.
Photo by Glen Wallace / wikimedia

An infuriating irony of the reform was that for community energy projects in Scotland, it actually made matters worse. New regional grid capacity requirements were set, and all of Scotland’s capacity for wind, solar and battery projects was allocated, up to 2035.

“This means that new community-led projects, including some that volunteers have spent years working on, will be unable to get a connection”, Zoe Holliday, chief executive of Community Energy Scotland, said in an interview.

“The only opportunities now available will be in cases where projects that have received offers don’t go ahead.” Then, “the impact on communities should be recognised” in the decision-making process, she said.

Another barrier to community energy in Scotland is the expensive and time-consuming Transmission Impact Assessment (TIA) required for projects larger than 200 kilowatts (kW) capacity, or just 50 kW on most of the Scottish islands. In England and Wales, the threshold for this process was recently raised to 5MW: Community Energy Scotland and the energy research group Regen call for a similar revision north of the border.

Along with the grid connection queue, community energy projects have to battle market regulation that favours large-scale electricity generation from gas-fired power stations.

Guaranteed prices for electricity exported to the grid are essential to make projects “financially secure long term”, and to attract investment and borrow funds from banks, Zoe Holliday of Community Energy Scotland said. Until 2019, small-scale renewables – including community projects – were supported by the Feed-in Tariff (FiT), a subsidy that was scrapped by the Tory government.

There are “multiple mechanisms that would work” today, Holliday argues: a floor price (i.e. a minimum that small renewables generators would be paid, supported by state guarantee if necessary); something similar to Ireland’s Small Scale Renewable Electricity Support Scheme, which includes a community tariff; or a simplified Contract for Difference (a financial derivative used by the government to protect commercial renewables projects from price swings volatile markets).

Community Energy England calls for a Community Energy Export Guarantee, with a minimum price guaranteed for 15-20 years. The MPs on the ESNZ committee backed that proposal, pointing to the lack of a secure pricing mechanism is “one of the biggest barriers” to the growth of community energy.

Community energy is also being stifled by market rules that all but force projects to sell via the wholesale market, advocates say. The “big six” corporations that control 90% of electricity sales are in no hurry to change the system.

Big suppliers buy electricity from community energy projects and sell it back to local people, often at two or three times the price. An energy club, that negotiates a “match price”, paid by households directly to a local generator when it is working, can cut out the middleman, and Energy Local, a non-profit, supports dozens of these.

Jeff Hardy of Sustainable Energy Futures, who leads an energy transition research team at Imperial College, London, said in an interview:

At present, being a small supplier is a dangerous place to be. You need to be able to do supply, and to do flexibility.

Steve Shaw of Power for People, which lobbies for legislation to enable community energy projects to sell electricity directly to local customers, said:

In practice, to make it economic and practical to get a supply licence, you need to operate on a national scale, and have more than 250,000 customers. This has to change.

The MPs on the ESNZ committee agreed: the cost of setting up as a supplier, and getting a licence, is “prohibitive for small community projects”, and licence exemption rules are not fit for purpose, they argued.

Regulators are working on a rule change that supports the formation of local electricity markets, called “complex sites” (Elexon’s P441 modification). But the ESNZ committee has told the government it should go further, though, “to accommodate all types of local supply and require the participation of local suppliers”.

The tweaking of local trading rules might sound arcane – but without it, the potential of decentralised networks, an essential technical complement to small-scale renewables, will never be tapped.

A report commissioned in 2023 by the government’s own innovation agency, Innovate UK, on the potential of decentralised energy resources was scathing, declaring it “difficult, if not impossible, to trade and settle energy locally in local energy markets”. This constrains not only small-scale renewable generation, but also flexibility, i.e. the efficiencies achieved by adjusting electricity use to reduce the load on networks at busy times.

The rules for licencing energy suppliers, and the industry’s self-governance of codes and standards, “stifles decentralised energy from realising its potential”, the report stated. The rules set by Ofgem, the industry regulator, for licencing are “complex, prescriptive, rigid – and were not designed with a highly decentralised energy system in mind”.

Government has a responsibility to champion inclusive ownership models – and this is missing from the Local Power Plan – Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP and long-time community energy campaigner, said in an interview. “Many community energy organisations are investor co-ops, rather than co-ops in the traditional sense, and the danger of losing the community aspect is always present.

To become a real force for uniting communities, co-ops should be open to people who are not in a position to invest, but are in a position to benefit from sharing energy resources.

Solar panels installed by Glasgow Community Energy at Ashton secondary school in Easterhouse

The weakness of local government structures, and a complex web of planning rules, further frustrate community energy, the House of Commons ESNZ committee heard from multiple witnesses.

The Energy Savings Trust told the MPs that there has been no long-term strategy to support community energy since 2014; many local authorities “do not have sufficient resources or knowledge” to give effective backing; and the competitive bidding processes through which they have to access funding are a “postcode lottery”.

Planning rules need to be revised and guidance be given by something better than GB Energy’s proposed advice service, the MPs concluded.

Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP, put the issue in political context in his evidence: the core problem with the Local Power Plan is that it has “few statutory powers to override existing constraints”.

He pointed to the Mozes community energy co-op in Nottingham, that spent several years applying for permissions to develop a local energy grid. “Detailed schemes were submitted, with university and energy technology partners, but blocked by the Distribution Network Operator, Ofgem or existing energy suppliers.

Current approaches are largely tokenistic and designed to be non-disruptive of the existing UK energy cartel.

Since it lacks teeth, what is the Local Power Plan likely to achieve, without additional pressure from civil society? Some campaigners fear that, given the finite budget and finite time-scale, cash support for shared ownership schemes – under which community organisations take shares in commercial renewable projects – is likely to be prioritised.

The danger looms of a gigantic failure to enhance social change and climate action.

Realising the potential of microgrids

A striking feature of the Local Power Plan is its lack of ambition for microgrids – proven technologies that cut carbon emissions and rationalise electricity use, and that community energy organisations would be well-placed to manage.

Microgrids are semi-autonomous from electricity networks, and share electricity produced locally. In the US, microgrid capacity, strongly supported by government, was expected to reach 10GW last year. Microgrids are mushrooming around industrial parks in China and are widely used in the global south to supply geographically distant communities.

US microgrid development is largely corporate-led, partly in response to soaring electricity demand from data centres. But it does not have to be. June Sekera of Boston University last year published a blueprint for community-run local power networks, envisaged as “a ‘back-to-the-future’ model – a return to decentralised, locally-controlled, non-corporate generation and supply of electricity: self-generation for self consumption”.

In the UK, things are slower. The Local Power Plan includes only a vague, timeless commitment that GB Energy “will explore, with stakeholders and expertise, the future potential of generating and sharing power locally” – even though the plan’s evidence annex lists ways in which microgrids can benefit the electricity grid.

Small-scale electricity generation “has the potential to defer network reinforcement, by lessening the growth in power flows that drive constraints on network assets”, the annex states. By making full use of flexibility, battery storage and rooftop solar, Smart Local Energy Systems (i.e. microgrids) could save £1.7 billion a year.

The combination of decentralising networks and flexibility “delivers multi-billion-pound annual systems savings”, the annex continues.

Were community-owned and -managed microgrids to develop at any scale, they would pose a massive headache to the big energy corporations, who make money by buying electricity and selling it to consumers.

Such microgrids would give communities greater control over the economics of electricity generation and use, and manifold opportunities to cut costs for households. They could also open up potential for energy efficiency, which has been “systematically underfunded” and tends to be implemented patchily by suppliers because it “jars with their business model to sell more commodities”, as the Innovate UK report argued; “it is hard to get paid for not demanding energy, even though it carries system benefits”.

Ultimately, community-managed microgrids could help to challenge the decades-old neoliberal assumption that electricity is best supplied as a commodity, instead of being provided as an essential service. Against this, radical engineering researchers have long ago shown how networks could treat electricity as a commons.

Tackling social injustice and global heating together

For all of us who seek to unite the struggles for social justice and climate action, community energy projects are a great inspiration. Where I live, South East London Community Energy has for years supported low-income households against fuel poverty and campaigned against energy system injustices. Volunteers up and down the country do the same.

What would it take to build on such action, to generate and use renewable electricity outside of the control of the big corporates and the markets they serve? Far more than is offered in the Local Power Plan, that’s for sure.

First, we need to try to find ways to restore the principle of electricity provision as a service that meets a need, not as a commodity. In my view, local supply rights that community energy advocates are demanding could be a step towards this. Then national market regulation needs to be prised out of the big corporates’ hands.

Second, the battle for public, community and collective forms of ownership is vital. The importance of inclusive co-operatives, open to all no matter their ability to contribute, can not be overestimated.

Third, we need to find ways for communities to access, and use, the technologies that allow decentralised renewables to realise their potential. Semi-autonomous microgrids with renewable generation and batteries are widespread: we need them here in the UK, free of corporate control.

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The Local Power Plan Risks Blocking Community Energy Potential

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani. 
Republished with thanks from the Ecologist

The UK government’s plan to shift to electrified, low-carbon heating of homes could be heading for ruinous failure without public sector provision and community engagement.

The £15-billion Warm Homes Plan (WHP), announced in January this year, envisages replacing gas boilers with heat pumps and retrofitting homes with insulation. There is also money for rooftop solar panels and batteries, and district heat networks.
Health workers demonstrate in London, demanding action on climate change, October 2022.
Photo by Steve Eason


But the government’s plan is flawed.

On one hand, it lags way behind what climate scientists say is needed to decarbonise the built environment. On the other, its focus on heat pumps for individual households, and away from improving the housing stock, will exacerbate inequality.

The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimates that, to meet the government’s emissions reduction targets by 2050, at least 15 million homes will need one or more insulation measures, eight million will need draft-proofing, and 21 million will need to swap gas boilers for heat pumps.

Heat pump installations, running at 60,000 per year in 2023, need to rise to nearly 450,000 per year by 2030 and 1.5 million per year by 2035, the CCC says.

The industry is unlikely to get halfway to that 2030 target, retorts Mars Mlodzinski, a heat pump market analyst, raising “serious questions” about the climate strategy.

And even these government targets are rejected by climate scientists as catastrophically inadequate.

To limit global heating to two degrees above pre-industrial levels – leave alone the 1.5 degrees that is far safer – a fair carbon budget for the UK (that is, the total of greenhouse gases the UK could emit from now on) would be just seven years’ emissions at the current level, professor Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester said at the recent National Emergency Briefing on climate.

“Inequality is deeply embedded” in current UK targets, which imply carbon emissions at three times its per capita share, Anderson said.

To play a fair part in tackling climate change, the UK would need to reduce emissions by 13 per cent per year – and deploy “timely technologies”, including retrofitting homes, “like the reconstruction of Europe after the second world war”.

To assess the government’s plan, and the response to it by the labour movement and social movements, here I look at seven interlocking problems:

🔥 The shift of focus away from retrofit towards heat pumps, in response to the disastrous failures of previous schemes;

🔥The continuing absence of effective regulation, and failure to create conditions for a workforce trained and rewarded for the task;

🔥 The danger that landlords in the private rented sector will use retrofit schemes further to bully and exploit tenants;

🔥 A failure of regulation and training for heat pump installation;

🔥 The mismatch of gas and electricity prices in corporate-dominated energy markets that obstruct electrification;

🔥 The lack of coordinated, place-based approaches to retrofit, exacerbated by the hollowing out of local government and direct labour organisations;

🔥And the government’s housing policy, focused on persuading developers and construction companies to build new stock, instead of undoing the damage done by decades of marketisation, including to insulation and heating.

To develop an approach that both drives out fossil fuels and reverses decades of mounting inequality in housing, the labour movement and social movements should take all these aspects into account.

Retrofit

Retrofit is the ABC of decarbonisation in the UK, where most houses are more than a century old, and the housing stock is the most poorly insulated in northern Europe.

And for several years up to 2012, millions of homes per year got insulation and/or boiler upgrades that were insufficient in climate policy terms, but better than nothing.

Then came the poorly designed 2012 Green Deal, and in 2015, universal eligibility for supplier-led schemes was scrapped.

Plans to tighten energy efficiency standards for new homes also went in the bin. Firms doing the work folded, and the number of jobs completed annually plunged by 70 per cent.

Worse was to come. In 2022, in response to the energy price shock, the Tory government committed £1 billion over three years to expand the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme. Then the Great British Insulation Scheme (GBIS), offering free cavity wall or loft insulation to some homes, was added.

Energy companies were required to finance decarbonisation of homes. They raised money from energy bills and offered grants through a patchwork of schemes that favoured higher-income households.

Contracts went to certified installers, who in turn sub-contracted to small businesses, who were motivated to cut corners, often incompetent, and sometimes corrupt.

Regulation of the schemes, by TrustMark, was a disaster. In 2024 journalists started reporting on homes trashed by cowboy operators. Alarm bells rang.

The National Audit Office found “major issues requiring remediation” in 98 per cent of homes fitted with external wall insulation, and 29 per cent of those fitted with internal wall insulation under the ECO4 and GBIS schemes.

There were “systemic” failings at every level, a senior civil servant told the House of Commons public accounts committee. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) designed the schemes “in a way that exposes it to both poor quality work and fraud”, the committee reported – and had no “credible” plan for fixing the damage.

The MPs pointed to evidence of fraud, and in April this year the Serious Fraud Office made four arrests in an investigation of three companies.

The regulatory framework for future schemes is under review by a government-appointed Retrofit System Reform Advisory Panel – but campaigners say a more drastic overhaul is needed.

The WHP, finalised as the scandal raged, shifts focus away from insulation. The government pledges to prioritise rooftop solar, clean heating, energy storage and flexibility – and funding looks set to go primarily to better-off households for heat pumps and solar panels (see below).

Retrofit of buildings’ fabric will now focus on low-cost upgrades such as double glazing, draught proofing and wall and loft insulation, especially to bring rented homes up to the government’s Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES).

This includes funding for councils to work on social housing, while landlords will be required to improve private rented homes – but on a smaller scale than under the scandal-plagued ECO scheme, which is being closed.

In a report for the Common Wealth think tank, researchers argued that expanding access to heat pumps and solar panels is essential – but that:

The plan risks missing those most in need: people living in homes that need substantial repairs to be ready for green upgrades, those struggling with energy bills but with incomes above grant eligibility thresholds, or living in older homes that require navigating more complex interventions and planning restrictions.

A neighbourhood-based retrofit strategy could shift the narrative. Madeleine Pauker, an energy researcher at the University of Sussex and one of the report’s authors, told The Ecologist: “The danger is that subsidies will flow to the more affluent owners of homes in the best condition, that are already decently insulated.”

Researchers and campaigners alike are signalling two wrong turns the WHP may take.

First, it may reinforce piecemeal, bit-by-bit retrofit, and sideline whole-building approaches that grouped together multiple insulation measures that were supported by the ECO4 scheme.

Second, politicians are suggesting that solid wall insulation is unnecessary; the CCC, for example, has dismissed it as “generally not cost effective”.

Pauker argues that, without it, Victorian and Edwardian homes will remain “cold, draughty and costly to heat”; it is complex to install but “why should complexity lead to failure?” The evidence shows that “the privatised delivery model cannot reliably handle that complexity,” and that is what needs to be challenged.

Retrofit workforce and regulation

The insulation scandal brought to a head two long-running crises in the construction industry – the collapse of regulation, and the degradation of training and education – exacerbated by the neoliberal economic policies of successive Tory and Labour governments.

People’s poorly insulated homes were made even colder and damper; poorly paid labour was left without the skills, job security and pay it needs to deliver. Two sides of the same coin.

Fuel poverty campaigners say that, for decarbonisation of homes to succeed, there must be accountability to residents. The guarantees and insurance schemes used under the previous schemes were shown to be useless.

Putting in cavity wall insulation. From the Wizard Eco web site

“Quality is integral to gaining public confidence that moving from fossil fuels to electricity can work,” James Dyson of E3G, who campaigns on fuel poverty, told The Ecologist.

People not only need installations, they need to be able to get them fixed if things go wrong. Protections need to be in place before heat pumps are installed.

The End Fuel Poverty Coalition (EFPC) proposes a Warm Homes Guarantee, built around “quality advice on the right installations to deliver”, and “a promise that every upgraded home will see energy bills come down”. Campaigners argue that decarbonising homes must be place-based, and that local government must play a key role (see below).

As for labour, energy researchers and trade unionists believe that, unless the dire shortage of workers with the right skills is overcome, decarbonisation of homes is doomed to fail.

“The shortage of skilled workers in key trades such as insulation, installation, heat pump fitting, ventilation and energy assessment”, and for commissioning and programming projects, is a “critical barrier” to scaling up retrofit, a study by the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose warned last year.

The authors see the government’s £625 million construction skills package, announced last year, as an “opportunity” – although that initiative is focused on building new homes, not retrofit.

The workforce problem is not just about numbers, but about quality, a submission to a DESNZ inquiry by the Greener Jobs Alliance argued. That means “depth and breadth of training” and “monitoring and accountability to residents”.

The construction and renovation/retrofit sector is “heavily dominated by small and micro-businesses, often operating on tight profit margins”, that lack the capacity to train apprentices. Construction training, and the construction sector, is “generally organised around specific skills rather than understanding of whole house thermodynamics so that interventions in one area don’t cause problems in another”.

The private rented sector

The danger that decarbonisation funds will be misused, and/or that electrification will make life worse for residents instead of better, is magnified in the private rented sector, where upgrade grants will be paid to landlords.

The government is tightening the MEES energy standards, which will need to be met for grants to be paid – but has refused to close some loopholes that tenants’ rights groups and fuel poverty campaigners say will allow abuse.

Campaigners fear that landlords might exploit retrofit requirements to justify rent increases, evictions or conversion to holiday lets, disproportionately impacting low-income tenants – as has happened with previous retrofit schemes.

Under the new standard, landlords will have to meet a primary standard related to building fabric, and to choose between secondary standards on smart-readiness or heating systems. They will have to spend £10,000 per property, but not more – exceeding this figure is one of a long list of grounds for exemption from the rules.

When the government held a consultation on the new MEES standards last year, a coalition of tenants’ groups urged that advisory services, not landlords, have the final say in what work is done; that the cost cap be raised to £15,000; and that all exemptions except for reaching the cost cap be scrapped. All these points were ignored.

Tenants’ rights have certainly been strengthened by the Renters’ Rights Act that came into force in May this year, chiefly by abolishing landlords’ right to “no fault” evictions.

But there are still battles to be fought over the WHP, Dyson says – first, because landlords, having received a government grant to upgrade a property, can increase the rent; second, because if the work is done badly and energy bills go up, tenants’ only defence is via tortuous complaints processes under e.g. the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS), which regulates heat pumps; and third, because landlords are not required to implement changes until October 2030.

Heat pumps and networks

A decade and more of government prevarication, failed retrofit schemes and fossil-fuel-friendly disinformation has left the UK with the least developed heat pump sector in Europe by far.

The UK has about 20 space heat pumps per thousand households, compared to 53 in Germany, 169 in France and 662 in Norway, data from the European Heat Pump Association shows. In 2025 the UK had 4 sales of space heat pumps per thousand households, compared to 7 in Germany, 12 in France and 44 in Norway.

UK heat pump sales rose by 27 per cent between 2024 and 2025, and the EFPC welcomed their decarbonising potential – but added that moving on to a heat pump “should come with a Warm Homes Guarantee, with independent advice, strong consumer protections and a clear promise that homes will be more comfortable after work is done”.

The underlying causes of previous retrofit schemes’ failures – the fragility of regulation, incentives for contractors to work shoddily, the lack of workforce training – apply equally to heat pump installation.

There are fewer than 4,000 qualified heat pump specialists in the UK, compared to the tens of thousands needed to meet government targets, the Renewable Heating Hub site estimates. For training, the government’s £8 million Warm Homes Skills Programme, which provides for £500 Heat Training Grant discounts, is “utterly inadequate to the scale required”.

The WHP also sets a goal of more than doubling, by 2035, the amount of heat provided by heat networks – but campaigners say there need to be real commitments to bring down bills.

“Heat networks must deliver promised savings and genuine efficiency to residents, and store excess energy locally for cheap or free distribution,” an open letter sent to ministers in April by 50 campaign groups said.

In response to a government consultation, Community Energy England argued that intervention is needed in areas that private capital – which will happily fund schemes in new-build developments – will tend to ignore: retrofitting existing (mostly gas-fired) networks that need to move off fossil fuels; homes in a ‘heat gap’, where fitting either individual heat pumps or networks is tricky, e.g. dense terraced and mixed-tenure streets, where Rossendale Valley Energy’s pioneering example could be followed by other community energy organisations; and feasibility studies and development of other community energy schemes.

Energy bills

A more immediate obstacle to widespread heat pump adoption is that, for many households, installation would not save money, due to the way electricity and gas prices are set. The markets are regulated to benefit corporations, not to help tackle climate breakdown.

Electricity costs households roughly five times as much as gas per unit of energy (about 27.5p per kilowatt hour earlier this year, compared to 5.5p per kilowatt hour for gas).

So, even though heat pumps convert electricity to heat energy more than three times as efficiently as boilers convert gas to heat energy, a heat pump still may not be cheaper to run than a boiler.

Fuel poverty campaigners have long demanded price reform. And even the government’s own Climate Change Committee says policy costs (items related to renewables investment guarantees and other policy decisions) should be removed from electricity bills, to make electricity cheaper in comparison to gas.

The problem runs deeper, though. UK wholesale electricity prices are set so that all power generators receive the price of the most expensive kilowatt-hour bought that day: this ties the wholesale prices of cheap-to-generate renewables power to gas prices and reinforces retail buyers’ vulnerability to volatile international fossil fuel markets.

To defend ourselves from all this means to reverse decades of neoliberalism and fossil fuel companies’ political power – by public ownership of energy companies and the setting of retail prices in the public interest, for example by means of a single, publicly owned buyer of wholesale electricity.

How the jobs get done

The travesty of past retrofit schemes was “not simply a story of inadequate oversight or accountability”, Madeleine Pauker argues; rather, trying to deliver high-quality retrofit through subsidies to contractors who are “structurally incentivised to minimise costs” made widespread failure almost inevitable.

The WHP is, in one respect, a step forward. Instead of funding decarbonisation through the ‘supplier obligation’ on energy companies – who raise the money from customers’ bills, penalising the poorest – the state will pay grants itself out of general taxation.

The money will still be spent unequally, though: while £4.4 billion will go to low-income homes for the most urgently needed upgrades, most of a £5.3-billion Warm Homes Fund and a £2.7-billion boiler upgrade scheme will go in grants and loans to better-off households. Often they will have to add their own cash to pay for heat pumps and solar panels.

Neoliberal ideology pervades the plan. It is presented not as a collective challenge in the face of climate emergency, or as public action to meet social need, but as an “offer to consumers”.

Campaigners have long insisted that housing will never be transformed on the scale required without empowering local government to coordinate the work – and they welcome the greater role for mayoral authorities and local councils envisaged in the WHP. But the government has no intention of reversing the long-term trend towards outsourcing work to contractors or the obliteration of councils’ direct labour organisations.

Evidence is clearly documented that public bodies such as the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund work more effectively than contractors, and that public schemes can better integrate retrofit with other home improvements and achieve economies of scale. So far, it is being ignored. Ellen Robottom of the Greener Jobs Alliance told The Ecologist:

To meet a challenge at this scale, we need a retrofit programme that is free at the point of installation. But to get a proper upgrade under the WHP, people either have to live in a home that is practically derelict to qualify for a grant, or they have to cover much of the cost themselves. Instead of this we need a mass installation programme on one hand, and a big training programme for the construction sector on the other, coordinated by the state and funded from progressive taxation.

Housing policy

The deep flaws in the WHP can only be understood in the context of the government’s signature policy of building 1.5 million new homes – which housing researchers say, despite some welcome funding for social housing, will not solve the problems caused by decades of marketisation.[1]

A demonstration for renters’ rights, April 2026, London.
Photo by Steve Eason
 
The government’s housing policy relies heavily on large-volume private sector developers, ensuring resource-intensive, energy-intensive construction, rather than making best use of the existing housing stock.

The damage done by decades of policy aimed at turning homes into financial assets – the rundown of social housing, the expansion of the private rented sector, the relentless increase of rents and mortgages – will not be undone. Where in the 1970s the state directly funded council housing, it now transfers billions each year to private landlords via housing benefit.

This grand capitulation to private wealth means that the UK’s housing stock is used inefficiently. Housing has become less affordable not because there is an underlying shortage of space, but because the space is used inefficiently. One third of households in England have two or more spare bedrooms, but financial disincentives make it difficult or impossible for those who wish to downsize to do so.

Well-researched solutions to the housing crisis – rent controls, the transfer of homes from the private rented sector to social housing, incentives for downsizing – are ignored by a government deeply wedded to neoliberal ‘market principles’.

This is the context in which sustainable retrofit and whole-house energy efficiency are sidelined. Circular construction practices and efficient use of residentially zoned land are too. Energy efficiency requirements for newbuilds are far from what they could be with modern building techniques and what they are in other European countries.

What to do?

Our homes are central to how we live, and the need to change the way they are heated is central to tackling climate breakdown. Decarbonisation, by way of retrofitting insulation and installing heat pumps and solar panels, could and should be a powerful theme to unify action on climate with action for social justice.

It is no surprise, then, that a wide swathe of civil society – from tenants’ and housing rights organisations and fuel poverty campaigners to climate activists and trade unionists – has responded forcefully to the government’s plans.

It is vital, and difficult, to take an integrated view of the problems. However, as far as I can see there is as yet no unifying force able to bring all these campaigning efforts together.

There is a good historical reason for this, in my view. In the 20th century, the labour movement’s aspirations were voiced politically through the Labour party. But 40 years of neoliberal reaction have not only produced the interlocking problems listed above – through marketisation of housing and energy supply, degradation of local government, ruination of public construction capacity and training – but also destroyed social democracy in its 20th-century form.

The current Labour government stands stubbornly for enforcement of neoliberal norms. Many of the campaign proposals mentioned above are effectively calls to restore bits of the social democratic gains of the late 20th century, from building industry regulation and restraints on exploitative landlords to public provision via local government.

How, and whether, such reversals can be achieved in the context of 21st-century capitalism, bent on further concentration of wealth and haunted by climate breakdown, is an open question.

That is not offered as a reason to despair, but as an assessment of the difficulties we need to overcome. With this in mind, there is every reason to believe that we can build new unifying forces to achieve aims that are so obviously necessary to tackle climate breakdown and social injustice.

More about this on People and Nature

🔥Decarbonising the built environment: a global overview / Nigeria / the UK

🔥Remaking home heating in the UK: a pamphlet to download

🔥Post-election battlegrounds for climate and social justice (July 2024)


[1] In writing this part I have, especially, learned from: UCL IIPP, Homes that Don’t Cost the Earth, ‘Taking Stock: A Foundation for Future Housing Strategy’(June 2025); and Nick Bano, Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis (Verso, April 2025)

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Decarbonising Homes 🏡 The Government’s Plan Is Heading For Failure

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