Ross Clark
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Middle-class and mourning the loss of your child benefit from 2013? Don’t worry: just get yourself a different kind of baby — a biomass boiler. That will qualify you for payments under the Renewable Heat Incentive, due to begin in June. Too bad if you don’t have the room for one — they are quite bulky and don’t really work on a scale suitable for a three-bed semi. But if you have a decent-sized farmhouse you can fit a £13,000 boiler with an output of under 45kW and the Treasury will pay you an annual benefit of 9p for every kilowatt-hour of energy you use for the next 15 years. Why not turn your heating up and enjoy it?
If you have at least half an acre of garden there is an alternative: a ground-source heat pump. That will earn you a payment straight from the taxpayer of 7p a kilowatt-hour for the energy you produce, guaranteed for the next 23 years. This should again translate into a tax-free return of around 10 per cent — and a nice warm mansion to boot.
Don’t forget, either, that for some reason I have never been able to fathom, the 2003 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy allows you to claim payments for your daughter’s pony paddock. And watch this space for ‘Environmental Credits’ — an idea floated by the Tories last year in which house builders developing green-field sites would be forced to buy credits from a landowner wanting to undertake improvements which would benefit wildlife. In other words, Barratt puts up a housing estate 20 miles away — and you get the cash for a new trout fishery.
Thank God for a government which believes in a proper benefits system.
Because you read about benefits
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