Hot on the tails of the end of the Feed-In-Tariff, news was announced that the Solar VAT level will rise from 5% to 20% on 1st October. This means that all domestic Solar or Solar and Battery installations will experience a price rise of about 15%. This starts to make the economics marginal and will make it much harder for home owners to justify installation.
If like me, you are convinced that it is important to keep making steps towards a low carbon future, then here are two simple acts that may help.
- I have created a parliamentary petition (well actually the one I created got rejected as a duplicate, so I have changed the link to the active one). I am not a natural social media influencer, but perhaps one of you reading this is. Please back it and share it and see if we can get government to focus on this.
- I have written to my MP. Please do the same (my full email is copied below).
To find your local MP’s contact email simply look here:
My letter to my MP, Mike Penning was as follows:
Dear Mike Penning
I previously wrote to you asking for you to raise my concerns in government about ending the Solar Feed-In-Tariff. This you did, for which I thank you.
The tariff ended on March 31st this year and, as expected, it has put a great deal of stress on the industry. It has made benefits for installing solar more marginal thus slowing current sales. In addition it caused an artificial peak in the market which has greatly reduced the efficiency of all solar related supply chains.
Now, it is followed by news just announced that the date is now set at 1st October 2019 for the VAT tariff on domestic solar systems to rise from 5% to 20%. https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/renewable-energy-vat-increase-solar-panels-battery-storage/
This will make the financial case for home solar very marginal indeed, and is likely to stop it in its tracks.
At a time when the world is needing to reduce its carbon footprint, this is a particularly short-sighted change. The VAT change will make almost no difference to the exchequer. The large solar installations are all by companies and so VAT exempt anyway.
Home solar installations have many benefits as follows:
- Self generation and consumption can reduce the load on national infrastructure.
- Energy generated is clean and carbon free at the point of generation.
- When home-owners adopt solar they start to think about their energy consumption; a vital evolution if we are to change energy use in coming years to meet the demands of climate change.
Please may I ask you to take this up with your colleagues to reverse this unnecessary change and show that the Conservatives are actively supporting the agenda of reversing climate change. It is a small action in a large process but will impact real jobs and livelihoods?
The solar industry is vital to slow down climate change and help us lead the world in green energy adoption and innovation.
Best regards
Jason Tisdall
And here is the reply from the Financial secretary to the Treasury, Jesse Norman MP (also available in this new blog):
