In March 2026, the UK government announced over £50 million in emergency support for low-income households relying on heating oil. The funding comes from the Crisis and Resilience Fund, a pool of money designed to help vulnerable people through unexpected hardship. The trigger this time was a sharp rise in kerosene prices driven by Middle East tensions, with retail prices climbing from around 70 pence per litre in December 2025 to around 90 pence by March. Reports of suppliers cancelling existing orders and re-quoting at higher prices prompted the Chancellor to call in the Competition and Markets Authority. The immediate crisis was real. But so was the pattern behind it.
During the winter of 2022 to 2023, the UK government ran the Alternative Fuel Payment scheme, providing a one-off payment of £200 to households in off-grid homes to cushion the blow from post-Ukraine energy market chaos. The mechanism now is different; the logic is identical. Whenever geopolitics disrupts oil markets, roughly 1.6 million British households that heat their homes with kerosene absorb the shock directly, the government steps in with a payment, and then the underlying situation carries on unchanged. This cycle is not simply a story about an exposed group needing protection. It is a story about what happens when both government and households defer a necessary decision for long enough that crisis management becomes the default response.
The structural exposure of heating oil users is not a fixed feature of the landscape. Unlike gas and electricity customers, those who heat their homes with oil are not covered by the energy price cap, meaning they are exposed to more immediate energy price hikes. They purchase fuel directly from distributors, with no regulatory buffer and no fixed contract protection. But the reason so many households remain in this position is not purely infrastructural. The technology to move them off heating oil has existed and improved for years, the financial incentives to do so have been substantial, and yet the rate of transition has remained far too slow.
High-temperature heat pumps are a particular case in point. A high temperature heat pump is a type of air source heat pump that can deliver water temperatures of roughly 60 to 75 degrees Celsius, comparable to what a conventional oil boiler produces. In many cases, there is no need to replace existing radiators or upgrade insulation, as these systems tend to be easy to retrofit without changes to a building’s existing infrastructure. The retrofitting barrier that many households cite as a reason for hesitation is, in a significant number of cases, far smaller than assumed. One homeowner who replaced a 1990s oil boiler installation with a high-temperature heat pump reported that the cost of running at higher water temperatures was only 6 to 8 per cent more than a standard low-temperature heat pump range, while being able to reuse existing radiators and the hot water cylinder entirely.
The running cost argument has also shifted decisively for households currently on heating oil. Oil boiler yearly running costs for a typical household are approximately £1,104, over £500 more than comparable heat pump running costs. That calculation was made before oil prices climbed to their current levels. Pair a heat pump with a dedicated smart tariff that draws electricity during off-peak hours at lower rates, and the gap widens further. On a specialist heat pump tariff, running costs can drop to around £600 per year, cheaper than any gas boiler and considerably cheaper than today’s oil. The government currently offers a grant of £7,500 through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, bringing the average installed cost of an air source heat pump to around £5,000 after the grant. The financial case for switching, particularly for households paying oil prices at their current level, is not marginal. It is clear.
The reluctance to act is therefore not primarily a matter of technology or affordability. It reflects a combination of inertia, unfamiliarity, and the reasonable human tendency to avoid disruption when the existing system is still functioning. These are understandable instincts. But when every period of elevated oil prices triggers a public subsidy, the cost of that reluctance is no longer borne by the household choosing to stay on oil. It is distributed across the public purse, which could otherwise be directing those resources toward accelerating the very transition that would make future bailouts unnecessary.
Government shares responsibility for this outcome. A coherent policy approach would use both incentives and graduated pressure: expanding grant access, improving installer availability in rural areas, and running sustained public information campaigns that explain what high-temperature heat pumps can actually do and what they cost to run. The media, too, tends to cover heating oil crises through the lens of household hardship and government response, without consistently reporting the accessible alternative sitting alongside the oil tank. That framing reinforces passivity rather than agency.
The decision to quietly drop the proposed 2035 ban on new fossil fuel boiler sales in early 2025, shifting to a purely carrot-based approach, removed one important signal of direction. A policy framework that relies solely on voluntary uptake, without any graduated cost on remaining with fossil fuels, will always struggle to overcome inertia at the pace the climate and the public finances require. Emergency oil payments are not inherently wrong. But every pound spent on them is a pound not spent on reducing the number of households who will need them again when the next price spike arrives. At some point, the repeated cycle of crisis and rescue has to give way to a more honest conversation about the cost of choosing not to change.
