One of the many organizations I have signed up to receive e-mail updates, recently got itself into a bit of a tizzy about our health and our air quality, it gave a link to yet another Government consultation, this time on the sale and use of wood burning and solid fuel stoves.
Sadly, when Boris Johnson went bonkers with his green crusade with insane plans to stop the production of internal combustion vehicles and the scrapping of gas boilers, which then drove people like me away from supporting him after returning to the Conservative fold after years away, as part of this madness his green Taliban set about looking at wood burning stoves. In 2020, they began the process of legislation which was, in 2021 enacted. This was The Air Quality (Domestic Solid Fuels Standards) (England) Regulations 2020. As I had previously pointed out in an article on this Bruges Group blog about this at the time, this was quite tame legislation as, in reality, it made little difference to what those who use these stoves were already doing anyway.
However, taking the green initiative to a new and desperate low, this current Labour Government, which has a compulsion to mess with and break everything it touches, are making plans to make the lives of those who retail and also the use wood burning stoves, a real misery. They have now set up my previously mentioned consultation period that suggest fining people who use and sell unapproved stoves as well as introducing nit-picking bureaucracy and regulations on their use.
In order to get the result they want, going against all logic, the consultation web-site opens with details of frighting statistics about air quality and dangerous particles from burning wood on unapproved appliances. This in reality is total nonsense as the threat to air quality from these stoves is so minimal this engineered panic is laughable.
I should declare an interest as I have experience in such matters after spending almost 30 years working in, and running, our family fireplace business which my late father started in 1946, although I am now retired.
When making and designing our bespoke fireplaces very few of our customers wanted the bother of lighting and using open fires or stoves. The great majority opted for gas fires, most of which were very efficient, clean to use and easy to light. The numbers of people using wood burning stoves as well as burning coal or, in 'Clean air zones' in towns and cities, burning clean smokeless fuels, is so low there is no problem from the products of combustion from them.
Once again this is yet another Labour Party attack on our rural areas where wood burning and solid fuel stoves are needed due to these remote areas having no gas supply. Without these appliances many farmers and others will have no heating or hot water. In order to protest as many people as possible need to complete the consultation and show their total opposition to any form of regulation and let this pig headed Government know that they are the problem rather than the wood burning stoves they now have their socialist beady little eyes on.
Yet again this hopeless Government is creating a problem where no problem exist, they are creating an inferno from a tiny spark.