SPD and FDP allegedly prevented Federal Economic Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) from enacting a socially tiered subsidy for the replacement of oil and gas heating systems in 2023. This is revealed by internal documents reported by the “Spiegel”.
According to the documents, the minister planned in the summer of 2022 to financially support weaker homeowners more strongly through the revision of the Building Energy Act. An internal ministry document from September 5, 2022, states that a bonus should be created for self-using homeowners with low income. Another document from January 16, 2023, demands that the support for low-income homeowners should be significantly higher.
After the bill was made public at the end of February 2023, an official from the then FDP-led Finance Ministry reportedly asked the Economics Ministry in an email to remove the sentence on social design from the draft. The Chancellery asked the Building Ministry, led by SPD’s Klara Geywitz, to develop a support concept, which was not completed until April.
On March 17, when the public outcry about the heating law was already significant, Habeck’s officials sent their support concept as a confidential document to the Finance Ministry. According to this, homeowners with an income of less than 20,000 euros per year would receive around 80 percent of the costs for a climate-friendly heating system from the state. The Finance Ministry allegedly rejected this.
SPD Minister Geywitz also wanted the state subsidy not to depend on the income of the owners, but mainly on the age of the boilers, as the FDP did. The Economics Ministry saw this critically, as the age of the heating system had no connection to the income of the owners.
The Building Ministry denied the allegations in response to the “Spiegel”‘s inquiry, stating that they had already requested a social component in 2022. However, the Economics Ministry “did not see the possibility of considering social components” at the time. The Finance Ministry refused to comment on the intermediate steps in the revision of the heating subsidy, as requested by the “Spiegel”.