The Gas Meter Tax

1. Report on the Gas Meter Tax

2. BEIS consultation on the Green Gas Levy

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is consulting over a proposed new “Green Gas levy”, which is effectively a gas meter tax, that will levy gas suppliers with the expectation that the costs will be passed on to customers.

A levy on suppliers that will be passed onto consumers is not in the interests of the 24 million households who use gas for their domestic heating. This is particularly concerning in the early phase where a flat charge per connected gas meter is proposed, so that a one bedroom flat will be charged the same rate as a ceramics factory.

It is regressive to pass the costs onto domestic consumers, potentially laying the burden of paying for the decarbonisation of heat onto households that can ill afford increases in their energy bills.

The Gas Meter Tax is being levied to subsidise biomethane (chemically the same as natural gas, but produced from renewable sources) being injected into the gas grid.

The danger of the so-called Green Gas Levy, is that it establishes a principal of the consumer paying a gas meter tax for a relatively minor contributing strand towards decarbonisation, and that this regressive mechanism, once established without consumers even noticing, will then be employed to fund the much larger infrastructure projects required for blue and green hydrogen.