An End to Gas Cookery

Food has led to some strange and deeply held customs about the right way to do things.  Should you add milk to the cup before or after you pour the tea in?  Does the jam or cream go on to your scone first, and should butter should be allowed as a further layer?  And whether it’s better to cook with electricity or gas?

All of these are largely societal behaviours learnt from your parents, or determined by where you live.  In the case of gas or electric, that’s heavily based on location.  If you grew up in a town, you’re likely to favour gas.  If your upbringing was more rural, where you’d not have had a gas supply, electricity would be the preference.  Both have strong advocates, and the web is full of opinions and rabbit holes to fall in, but it looks as if that won’t remain a choice for long, as the UK Government is considering ways of stopping us cooking with gas.

Not surprisingly, this is one of the latest ideas from Ed Miliband’s Dash for Net Zero.  As his initiatives start to unravel, DESNZ – the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, is getting sneakier in their attempt to change the way we live.  The proposal to “ban” gas cookers and hobs are contained in their latest consultation document on Home Energy Model: Energy Performance Certificates.  Energy Performance Certificates, or EPCs are documents assessing how energy efficient your home is.  You have to pay to get an EPC before you can sell a house, and there is increasing pressure to use them as a policy to force the “upgrading” of rented houses and flats, forcing landlords to improve the physical condition of the properties. 

At a simplistic level, they feel like a good idea, but like many broad brushes, they quickly fall over.  Britain has some of the worst housing stock in the developed world.  The UK has a relatively moderate climate, thanks to the presence of the Gulf Stream.  Without the more severe winters of our European neighbours, successive Governments have been happy for householders to burn cheap coal and gas to keep their homes warm.  On the few occasions when they have though about tightening up building standards, large builders have lobbied successively against major changes.  Now, with legally binding net zero targets, the realisation that heating these poorly insulated homes generates around a quarter of the UKs carbon emissions is causing panic.  Carrots, in the form of subsidies for insulation and heat-pumps haven’t really worked (unless you’re a cowboy installer, in which case they’ve worked very well), so attention is turning to finding sticks to beat up property owners.

The current and updated EPC scheme gives every house an energy rating that goes from “A” (toasty warm and so well insulated it will overheat if you have more than one child) to “G” (book your hyperthermia hospital admission now).  Traditionally, a man (87% of EPC assessors in the UK are male) comes round with a tablet, looks at your windows and what type of heating you have, and gives you a score.  They also provide helpful suggestions on how you could make your home more energy efficient, along with estimated costs for those improvements, which are rarely accurate.

Ever keen to increase the amount of data they have about your house, this new consultation is proposing that rather than having an inspector largely guessing at how efficient you house is, they can supplement it with information captured by an SMETER.  An SMETER isn’t just a smart meter, it’s a Smart smart meter, which can compare your internal heating with the weather outside to provide real numbers about your home’s thermal performance.  There’s a lot to be said for that, as accurate data helps you make better decisions.  But for DESNZ, the approach to better consumer decisions is no longer nudges from better data, but a hearty application of the stick.  So, the new  SMETER data will be used to help determine your EPC rating.

This is where the proposals get a bit freaky.  As you read them, it becomes apparent that the doubleplusgood of DESNZ’s netzero aspiration is an “A/B” rating for your EPC.  You should install solar panels (but not too many), along with battery storage.  You should have a bidirectional EV charger, which means that your vehicle’s battery can supply electricity back to the grid if necessary.  There’s a naughty corner if you use any fossil fuels for heating (and we’ll probably have scented candle police to monitor that) and the worst crime of all will be cooking with gas.  Nobody in that naughty corner will be allowed an “A/B” rating.   In DESNZ’s eyes, it’s Electrons Good, Weakly Ionized Plasmas Bad.

This is dogma, but they try so hard to wrap it up with scientific “evidence”.  They sell the eradication of gas cooking as a health benefit, reviving the concerns about internal air pollution from gas flames.  What they miss are the practical implications.  They ignore the financial cost and impracticability of converting over half of UK homes to electric cooking.  In most of Europe, gas is used for cooking in around 30% of homes.  In the UK it’s the most common way to cook meals, with 54% of homes using gas.  Nowhere does the consultation mention how you retrain half of the population to cook differently.  Then there’s the practical issues. 

Putting aside whether gas is better or worse, you can’t easily swap out a gas hob for an electric one.  Electric hobs need a 45 Amp feed back to the fusebox, which you won’t have if your house or flat was fitted out for gas.  Installing that is costly and disruptive.  At some point, hob manufacturers might include large lithium batteries to store power locally, so they could run from a 13A socket, but they’ll not be cheap, and as far as I know they don’t exist yet.  Alternatively, you could give up using a hob or oven and buy a microwave or an air fryer.  But based on the examples you see on their packaging, it seems they’re generally the entry appliances to ultra processed food and long term chronic health conditions.  So, the NHS might have something to say about those unintended consequences and the resulting cost of treating an even less healthy population.  But none of that appears to have been considered.

The more you look at this consultation, the more it looks as if it has been written by and for people who live in relatively modern homes in nice suburbs.  They’ll have solar panels, drives to park their electric vehicles with their own “his and hers” charging points and they wouldn’t contemplate cooking with gas because everyone on MasterChef uses electric ovens and induction hobs.  It feels like an exercise in Mr Miliband and his civil servants mansplaining about why their houses deserve their “A/B” ratings and ours don’t.  And why everyone else needs to spend money they don’t have on expensive retrofitting.  It is far too flavoured with entitled, arrogant nonsense.

I don’t have an issue with the aspirations that we should all have more energy efficient homes and pay less for energy, but this Consultation feels all about virtue signalling, whilst ignoring the real problems of the fuel poor and the millions of people living in older homes.  Until DESNZ evolves to grasp that reality, it’s unlikely that anything will change.  Other than making it ever more expensive to sell or rent a property.

A number of organisations have published their response to this consultation, enthusiastically endorsing the proposal that gas cooking should prevent a property attaining an “A/B” rating.  The responses I’ve seen have all been from netzero pressure groups or companies with a vested interest in retrofitting.  None have come from anyone looking at health or social implications.  But unless those arguments are heard, DESNZ will assume that gas cooking can be ostracised, putting policies in place which will place a burden on over half of the population.  The consultation ends on 18^th March, so there’s still time to respond.  Or write to your MP about the cavalier way that DESNZ is attempting to change British culture.