There has long been a realization that we are not going to meet UK climate targets without addressing how we heat our homes and supply them with hot water. But actually doing something about it in the borough of Hounslow has taken some time – and what we have managed to do so far is still relatively small.
Our existing homes are predominantly heated by gas. Burning gas creates carbon dioxide (CO2) which accumulates in the atmosphere and heats up the earth – potentially destabilising the very ecological systems we depend on for our lives.
There are cleaner alternatives to the current approach which are, in the context of Hounslow, largely to have Air Source Heat Pumps, powered by renewable electricity in better insulated homes.
The question has been how to get from where we are to where we would like to be.
The biggest problem is the existing housing stock, but there is an easier challenge with new build housing. In the late 2010s, the Hounslow Green Party (HGP) started a campaign to address new builds.
Building regulations in the late 2010s already required well insulated homes, but did not require clean heating systems (eg Air Source Heat Pumps). The planning system did include some encouragement away from gas to electric but not enough. Some of this was in a Carbon Offset mechanism – but the money paid by developers was far too small to persuade them to make much of a change.
The HGP did have some campaigning to increase the offset payments – and there has subsequently been some increase. But paying offset payments still meant CO2 was going into the atmosphere and heating up the earth – so not the real solution.
The main strand of the campaign was to object to gas boilers in large developments coming for planning permissions. For a while HGP objections were largely ignored by the planning committee and the developers – but it did manage to raise awareness.
But after the council declared a climate emergency in 2019, this was an additional argument to be made against gas boilers. Finally in 2020, in response to proposed gas boilers on a fairly small council development, an objection by HGP to gas boilers was finally upheld by the council. Senior council officials came to the planning committee to announce new policy that council lead developments would not have gas boilers. All HGP had to do in their presentation to the planning committee was to thank them for their new policy. This policy has lasted to this day.
Further to this decision, council officers have encouraged non-council developers to use clean electric heating rather than polluting gas in their proposals. This has had a much larger impact as there are far more of them.
While HGP should celebrate this success, we have been less successful in pushing forward the transition to clean heat in existing buildings. We did think that the council had committed to clean heat in all existing council buildings by 2030, as part of their Climate Emergency Action Plan. But in early 2025, the council did a U turn on this and considerably watered down this commitment.
This is another area where the HGP will continue to campaign.
Tony Firkins
15 June 2025