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The funding, which will be available from April, forms part of a £450million Boiler Upgrade Scheme to help install low-carbon systems in millions of homes.

Heat pumps – which are normally more expensive – will cost the same to buy and run as fossil fuel boilers by 2030 under the Government programme.

This is part of a wider £3.9billion boost to decarbonise heating and buildings. Ministers want to slash dependency on fossil fuels and exposure to global price spikes, while supporting up to 240,000 jobs by 2035.

But the strategy was delayed by battles in Cabinet over fears of an electoral backlash in replacing gas boilers with more costly and less efficient heat pumps.

But Mr Johnson said: “We are backing our brilliant innovators to make clean technology like heat pumps as cheap to buy and run as gas boilers – supporting thousands of green jobs.”

The Government has pledged no one will be forced to remove existing fossil fuel heaters.

Instead, households will install the eco option when they need to be replaced.

There are 29 million homes in the UK and about 80 per cent are heated by gas, making the strategy a hot political issue. The Prime Minister added: “Our new grants will help homeowners make the switch sooner, without costing them extra, so that going green is the better choice when their boiler needs an upgrade.”

But campaigners accused the Government of “unambitious policies and inadequate funding”.

Greenpeace UK said the heat and building strategy has stopped short of what is needed to transform housing into clean, affordable, energy-efficient homes “we all want and need to be living in”.

Caroline Jones, the group’s climate campaigner, said: “More money must be provided to rapidly increase the number of homeowners switching, with full costs covered for families on low incomes. A clearer signal would have been a phaseout of new boilers before 2035. All of this must be delivered at a scale and speed the Government hasn’t fully grasped.”

But Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, who backs the Daily Express campaign to save gas boilers within our Green Britain Needs You campaign, said: “Heat pumps are not the answer.

“We don’t have to give up our boilers, we have to give up fossil gas. It will cost 10 times as much to move to heat pumps as it will to use green gas.”

Meanwhile, Chancellor Rishi Sunak yesterday set out new environmental standards for large businesses in a bid to weed out “greenwashing” – the term used for making misleading statements about having eco credentials.

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