The reality of the cost of green policies is beginning to hit home as Labour ditches £28bn pledge - Andrew Vine

It doesn’t matter if you’re in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Hull or any number of the old industrial towns in between. The story is the same across much of our county.

Affluent areas soon give way to suburbs which are home to some of the poorest communities in the North, who cannot meet the costs of going green that are becoming increasingly apparent if the country is to meet its target of net zero emissions by 2050.

The bill for achieving that goal is not going to fall upon the Exchequer, but on millions of individual households who haven’t the means to pay it.

Labour’s abandonment last week of its flagship policy of spending £28bn a year to make the country greener amounted to an acknowledgement of that.

The money would have to be raised by taxation or borrowing – which ultimately has to be paid back from taxes or cuts to public services which are already threadbare.

With households struggling and shouldering the highest burden of taxes for decades, the policy would be both unaffordable and electorally disastrous.

The party’s embarrassment and internal divisions over ditching the only solid pledge for government it has so far made is its own fault.

Months of insisting that it would go ahead, even when it was obviously unachievable, was an avoidable mistake that has dented Labour’s credibility.

Yet the Conservatives have no grounds for jeering. Their own uncertainties about green policies, just as much as Labour’s, illustrate how ideals and good intentions are not surviving contact with reality.

Another indication of that came a day before the Labour U-turn, when it emerged sales of electric vehicles are sluggish, with 25 per cent fewer sold to private buyers last month. Overall, the gradually increasing take-up of EVs is largely reliant on fleet sales to businesses who are taking advantage of a government tax break to go green.

The figures prompted the House of Lords environment and climate change committee to warn Britain is stuck in the slow lane in moving away from petrol and diesel.

Now-familiar reservations by drivers about the range of EVs and a lack of charging points are holding the electric revolution back.

And so too, the installation of heat pumps is not proceeding anything like as quickly as the government wants. Its jitters about promoting them were obvious last week when it announced the scrapping of a plan to effectively fine boiler manufacturers who don’t encourage their customers to fit pumps instead. Those fines would ultimately be paid by households in increased prices.

This is all about costs to the public. In an election year, neither the Conservatives or Labour dare to be seen adding to bills that many are already having trouble paying, especially when there are lingering public reservations about the technologies for getting around or keeping warm.

Two couples I know neatly sum up the continuing doubts and uncertainties about heat pumps.

One, in Ilkley, were early adopters and determined to make their home as environmentally-friendly as possible.

Now, they rue the day they had a pump put in. It doesn’t heat their home as effectively as the gas boiler did, and far from their bills falling, they have gone up because of the need for additional electric heaters to keep warm.

But the other couple, from Sheffield, are delighted with their heat pump – even though they had to spend a lot of money on insulation and new double-glazing to ensure their house is warm enough.

What both couples have in common, though, is being comfortably-off. The outlay for new heating systems was well within their means and they are fortunate enough not to have to worry about paying the bills.

That is a position that the overwhelming majority of Yorkshire’s five million residents can only dream about. For them, the price-tag of investing in new green technologies is unthinkable, however much they would like to.

Old petrol and diesel cars will have to stay on the road as long as possible, and the past-it gas boiler somehow kept going.