JOSEPH DINNAGE: Labour's climbdowns on gas boilers and EVs reveal a basic truth: State diktats are the enemy of growth and innovation

Another year, another galling display of green virtue-signalling.More than 100,000 people and 90 heads of state are descending onto Antalya, Turkey for the annual United Nations convention on climate change, COP31, which kicked off yesterday.Many of these eco-conscious dignitaries will only countenance travelling to such a shindig by private jet, of course. Even the most ardent gas-guzzler would wince at the carbon footprint.This year’s instalment looks to be a particularly lavish affair. You only need to take a look at the sprawling conference centre – which spans 112 hectares and is surrounded by an enormous artificial lake – to get a sense of the pomposity.But the latest edition of this annual carnival of hypocrisy falls at a funny time for the green agenda, particularly here in Britain.Since the election of Andy Burnham, some are suggesting that Net Zero has begun to take a back seat in the Government’s list of priorities.This would be quite the transition: it was only a short time ago that the Left-wing New Statesman magazine was proclaiming Ed Miliband – then Energy Secretary and arguably the architect of the modern Net Zero agenda – as the most powerful man in British politics.Yet it’s clear the eco-agenda is no longer the central ideological pillar it once was. 'Put yourself in the shoes of a British car manufacturer. You have spent decades building a business only to be told to repurpose your supply chain to meet a target plucked out of thin air'Following the announcement of the Government’s approval for more drilling in the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea – welcome pragmatism which must now be extended to the much larger Rosebank oil and gas field – targets for the rollout of electric vehicles are now also expected to be reduced.Under the current rules, 80 per cent of new cars sold in Britain must be electric by 2030 – a process set in motion by Boris Johnson in 2020, downstream of Theresa May’s legally binding and entirely arbitrary commitment to Net Zero by 2050.After a ‘consultation’ that ended on Friday, the mandate for electric vehicles could fall to as low as 50 per cent, though the target of phasing out new petrol and diesel cars by 2035 is likely to remain.About time, too. Put yourself in the shoes of a British car manufacturer. You have spent decades building an established and profitable business producing internal combustion engine cars for British families – only to be told by ministers with PPE degrees and zero experience of enterprise to repurpose your entire supply chain to meet a target plucked out of thin air.Yet while this reduction in EV quotas should be welcomed, it does not go far enough. The mandate should be scrapped entirely.The Government should not be imperilling businesses through ideological top-down diktats. Besides, modern petrol combustion engines are dramatically cleaner nowadays, with emissions a fraction of what they were in the 1990s.Accompanying the partial U-turn on electric vehicle targets is a new volte face on how we heat our homes. Net Zero rules introduced under Sir Keir Starmer would have forced new-build properties to use expensive and inefficient ‘green’ systems such as heat pumps rather than traditional gas boilers.That was until Labour’s oh-so idealistic targets collided with reality, and the party discovered that developers could not keep up with Labour’s burdensome demands – thus jeopardising the Government’s flagship housebuilding target to build 300,000 new homes a year during the current parliament. (They almost certainly won’t meet this anyway.)The U-turn on boilers is a second welcome step – but it should send ministers an important lesson: command economies don’t work. A world in which private companies are forced to shape their production strategies to the ideological whims of Whitehall pencil-pushers is a world of inefficiency, wastefulness and warped priorities.Private enterprise, not ministerial decree, is the motor of economic growth, and a government that gets out of the way and allows businesses to innovate is the only one that genuinely boosts prosperity. Electric vehicles and heat pumps are beset with difficulties that their counterparts lack. They are less efficient, often more expensive and energy-intensive to produce. Government fiat will never change this. Only business and the markets will – providing the former is given the space to innovate and the latter are allowed to operate unfettered.Labour should learn from its own mistakes.In 2007, Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, and Hilary Benn, Environment Secretary, announced a plan to phase out traditional incandescent light bulbs by 2011.They were going to replace them with an ‘energy-saving alternative’, they promised: compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Supermarkets and high-street retailers were told they would no longer be able to sell the traditional bulbs we’d all known all our lives.The problem was that consumers hated the new bulbs, which were slow to turn on, tended to flicker and were dangerous to dispose of as they contained mercury and other toxic chemicals.A few years later, along came a solution, in the form of LED lights – which are far more efficient, safer and last much longer than CFL bulbs.In other words, the Government meddled unnecessarily, and the well-intentioned but wrong-headed ‘transition’ to CFL bulbs – which never happened – is estimated to have cost the country £3billion.That these mistakes are taking place in Britain of all countries is particularly galling. In less than 100 years from the 1760s onwards, the Industrial Revolution turned a largely agricultural country into the world’s first industrial and urban superpower.This was not because Georgian officials dictated which technologies private companies should and should not pursue, but because inventors and entrepreneurs were free to take calculated risks and to harness the abundant energy and natural resources contained in our geography to turn these risks into productive enterprise. The extortionate cost of Net Zero, imposed on businesses by Tory and Labour governments through targets and cumbersome regulations –and passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices – is now standing in the way of a second age of enterprise and wealth creation.We at the Prosperity Institute have calculated just how much Net Zero has eaten away at Britain’s industrial potential. Output in our energy-intensive industries such as steel-making and oil-refining has halved since 2000, as has employment – down from 800,000 jobs to 413,500, despite overall population growth.While global factors like Chinese overproduction have played a role, domestic energy policy has been at least as important. Net Zero commitments have driven Britain’s electricity prices to the highest in the developed world, placing immense pressure on manufacturers and acting as a massive drag on our entire economy.The price of cement rose 15 per cent above inflation between 2015 and 2024. As recently as 2021 we were self-sufficient in ammonia, essential for making fertiliser. Now we produce none.Such raw materials are taken for granted as ministers assume they can always be sourced from abroad – but they are the building blocks of economic progress, and without them we are stuffed.We have the ability to create an economy which can both develop the technologies of the future and keep bills down for consumers and businesses alike. But we will not get there with costly mandates that stifle the productive part of our economy and force Britons to adopt practices and technologies that make their lives more difficult and more expensive.The Government’s moves on Jackdaw, electric vehicles and gas boilers are steps in the right direction. But they are only a start. If the Prime Minister truly wants ‘growth in every postcode’ as he promises, he must learn to abandon his statist ways, stop assuming he and his ministers always know best – and move out of the way so that businesses can sink or swim their own.Joseph Dinnage is senior press officer at the Prosperity Institute.