Cuts to insulation scheme will leave homes cold over winter, experts say
Cuts to a scheme for insulation and heatpumps for low-income households will leave homes damp, draughty and unsafe over winter, experts have said.Housing have asked for a one-year extension to the scheme to ensure continuity and prevent small retrofit firms going bust.Companies say funding for solar panels and insulation is already being withdrawn, leaving homes cold and draughty as winter sets in.Rachel Reeves announced in her budget that she would cut £150 a year from the average energy bill, partly financed by axing the £1.3bn energy company obligation (ECO) scheme that helped fund upgrades for homes owned or rented by households earning under £31,000.
This scheme is due to be end in March,The government plans to launch a “warm homes plan” to provide funding for heat pumps, insulation and other home upgrades but this has been beset by delays,Experts have said this will affect an estimated 222,000 future retrofit projects that would have cut bills for low-income households,Though the scheme was controversial – with some external wall insulation fittings were faulty and had to be replaced – it has delivered retrofits to more than 15m homes since 2013, saving £110bn on energy bills,An estimated 23,000 of these had problems with the external wall insulation.
Experts warn that uncertainty and the gap between schemes, experts have warned it could trigger job cuts and force some businesses to fold.The climate change thinktank E3G estimates the cut will eliminate 10,000 skilled jobs, including many apprenticeships, roughly the same number employed at Jaguar Land Rover’s Solihull plant.Anna Moore, McKinsey’s former head of UK construction and now a founder at Domna, a retrofit company working with housing associations, social landlords and councils, has written to the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, to request ringfencing for funding for low-income households in the warm homes plan, and for a year’s extension.She said: “Suddenly yanking £1.3bn in funding is chaotic, and has created a cliff edge for thousands of low-income households in fuel poverty as well as small and medium enterprises employing some 10,000 people.
“With fuel poverty growing and business under pressure, it beggars belief that a successful scheme funnelling utility firm funding to the poorest households in society should be brutally cut.And for what? To create a few short-term headlines around cutting net zero levies.“This fundamentally goes against Labour’s stated values of wanting to help the poor and to fight climate change.This is not the moment to pull up the ladder.Bridging ECO to the warm homes plan is essential if we are to protect residents, protect jobs and protect progress.
”Small firms have asked for clarity and an extension to the scheme to protect their businesses.Joel Pearson, director at Net Zero Renewables, a -based solar panel installer, said: “We employ and subcontract over 35 skilled individuals, and have helped take more than 200 homes out of fuel poverty through the ECO scheme.“I would urge Rachel Reeves to think again and to at least extend this existing scheme by a year so we can see an orderly transition and support firms like ours helping to mitigate climate change.”Lee Rix, the managing director at Eco Approach, a Preston-based installer, said: “Each year our 150-plus staff and supply chain use ECO4 funding to make cold, inefficient homes safer and more affordable for thousands of families in fuel poverty.With no transition plan, ending ECO4 risks leaving those families abandoned and undermining the workforce that supports them – we urgently need clarity on a successor scheme.
”Moore added: “Funders are pulling back on anything new that hasn’t already been allocated (we had several calls to that effect from installers today, saying their funding has been cut – literally pressing pause on about 1,500 homes receiving insulation or solar pre-Christmas).The immediate impact is slamming the breaks on programmes, right in the middle of a cold snap.”There are also fears that removing the scheme without the warm homes plan in place will cause more people to live in fuel poverty for longer, as insulation and solar can bring down energy bills.A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “The ECO and great British insulation schemes were not delivering value for money.We are instead investing an additional £1.
5bn into our warm homes plan, taking it to nearly £15bn – the biggest ever public investment to upgrade homes and tackle fuel poverty,”
Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation
Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.The degree of increased division – known as “affective polarisation” – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed.The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views
Foreign interference or opportunistic grifting: why are so many pro-Trump X accounts based in Asia?
When X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The result, however, has been a circular firing squad of recriminations, as users turn on each other enraged by the revelation that dozens of popular “America first” and pro-Trump accounts originated overseas.The new feature was enabled over the weekend by X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, who called it the first step in “securing the integrity of the global town square.” Since then many high-engagement accounts that post incessantly about US politics have been “unmasked” by fellow users.An Ivanka Trump fan account that posts about illegal immigration to the US was shown to be based in Nigeria
London councils enact emergency plans after three hit by cyber-attack
Three London councils have reported a cyber-attack, prompting the rollout of emergency plans and the involvement of the National Crime Agency (NCA) as they investigate whether any data has been compromised.The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and Westminster city council, which share some IT infrastructure, said a number of systems had been affected across both authorities, including phone lines. The councils shut down several computerised systems as a precaution to limit further possible damage.The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham had also reported an attack. Together the three authorities provide services for more than half a million Londoners
European parliament calls for social media ban on under-16s
Children under 16 should be banned from using social media unless their parents decide otherwise, the European parliament says.MEPs passed a resolution on age restrictions on Wednesday by a large majority. Although not legally binding, it raises pressure for European legislation amid growing alarm about the mental health risks to children of unfettered internet access.The European Commission, which is responsible for initiating EU law, is already studying Australia’s world-first social-media ban for under-16s, which is due to take effect next month.In a speech in September, the commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said she would watch the implementation of Australia’s policy
ChatGPT firm blames boy’s suicide on ‘misuse’ of its technology
The maker of ChatGPT has said the suicide of a 16-year-old was down to his “misuse” of its system and was “not caused” by the chatbot.The comments came in OpenAI’s response to a lawsuit filed against the San Francisco company and its chief executive, Sam Altman, by the family of California teenager Adam Raine.Raine killed himself in April after extensive conversations and “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”, the family’s lawyer has said.The lawsuit alleges the teenager discussed a method of suicide with ChatGPT on several occasions, that it guided him on whether a suggested method would work, offered to help him write a suicide note to his parents and that the version of the technology he used was “rushed to market … despite clear safety issues”.According to filings at the superior court of the state of California on Tuesday, OpenAI said that “to the extent that any ‘cause’ can be attributed to this tragic event” Raine’s “injuries and harm were caused or contributed to, directly and proximately, in whole or in part, by [his] misuse, unauthorised use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT”
Europe loosens reins on AI – and US takes them off
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from an American grocery store, where I’m planning my Thanksgiving pies.In tech, the European Union is deregulating artificial intelligence; the United States is going even further. The AI bubble has not popped, thanks to Nvidia’s astronomical quarterly earnings, but fears persist. And Meta has avoided a breakup for a similar reason as Google
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