How to warm your mansion with other people’s money

Let no one say this is not a redistributive government. It is taking benefits away from the poor and giving them instead to people with large houses and a bit of spare capital. How? Through a great green energy scam, originally devised by Labour, which could not be better designed to penalise the poor and reward the rich. In fact, the government might just as well have come up with Spat Credits or a Top Hat Top-Up Allowance. Here is a brief guide to benefits for the better-off.

Got a roof space the size of half a football pitch? You can coin it by covering it with 4kW worth of photo-voltaic panels, thereby qualifying you for a 41.3p handout from your electricity company for every kilowatt-hour of electricity you produce. Not only that: you will earn a further 3p per kilowatt-hour for any of this electricity that you sell back to the national grid.