Activists from Greenpeace parked a van outside the prime minister’s £1.5m campaign home and used it to broadcast the trailer of a hard-hitting documentary on the facade of the Georgian mansion. He reminds Sunak that energy companies are set to make £170 billion in super profits over the next two years – but that it would cost “just” £55 billion to insulate all UK homes, which are some of the coldest and most land in Western Europe. “If the government doesn’t step in, we’ll suffer every winter while corporations get richer,” the film says. The trailer was displayed at the front of the Grade II listed house near Northallerton in North Yorkshire as night fell on Wednesday. The prime minister was at the G20 leaders’ meeting in Bali at the time. His wife and daughters are not believed to have been at home during the stunt. Campaigners were able to play the nine-minute film twice without any response from anyone inside. The film, made in collaboration with the New Economics Foundation thinktank, tells the story of a community struggling to support itself and each other through the cost of living crisis in food banks and community centres. It focuses on Maltby in the South Yorkshire constituency of Rother Valley, which went Conservative for the first time in 2019. It will be shown in public screenings across the UK from Wednesday. New polling, commissioned by Greenpeace by Survation, found that 64.6% of people in the UK have had to make cuts to other spending due to rising energy bills, rising to 72.5% in ‘red’ constituencies wall”. Almost 77% would support a government program to install home insulation in their area, rising to 80% in the red wall. Heather Kennedy, a community organizer from the New Economics Foundation who works in and around the Rother Valley and helped produce the film, said: “Rising energy prices are greatly exacerbated by our poorly insulated leaky homes, which waste our money every time we turn on our heating. “But there is investment the government could make in this budget that will protect us from rising energy costs this winter and winters to come. Our Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, should launch a national home improvement program to insulate Britain’s cold, rainy homes this winter.” Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Almost 7 million households – a quarter of the country – are already on fuel, and this is expected to rise to 11 million next year without further government intervention. A recent report by Cambridge Econometrics on behalf of Greenpeace UK suggested that a government-backed program to insulate homes and install heat pumps could inject almost £7bn a year into the economy and create nearly 140,000 new jobs until 2030. Ami McCarthy, political campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “What the country needs is a massive insulation program which should be paid for with a windfall tax on the companies making huge profits at our expense. The government introduced a windfall tax but left a huge loophole that gives huge amounts of that money to fossil fuel companies’ expansion plans that won’t heat our homes for years, but will heat the climate for centuries.”
