Government 'Green Deal' Announcement

Ed Davey’s announcement regarding the government’s ‘Green Deal’ has been met with caution from industry. The Energy and Climate Change Secretary announced that the scheme will have a phased introduction, taking 18 months to get going. Furthermore, changes to the parameters of the plan mean that loft and cavity wall insulations would drop dramatically under the green deal. The rate of loft insulation announced in the plan remains vastly lower than the 2.1 million per year which the government's official advisers, the committee on climate change is required for the UK to meet its climate change targets.

In a statement he said: “The Green Deal has the potential to support up to 60,000 jobs in the insulation sector alone, more than doubling the number of jobs in the sector, and making a real contribution to green growth". The Department of Energy and Climate Change says the scheme will cost around £17.3 billion over ten years and bring £25.6 billion of benefits.

Mike Howard, Director of Green Energy EU (UK) commented: “We always feared the Green Deal would follow the route of ‘uncertainty and indecision’, and this is now proving to be the case. One of the original main beneficiaries of this was going to be people suffering fuel poverty; by providing energy saving measures where the capital costs would be added to their energy bills, but savings would be greater that the amount being added bills. It now seems now though, that these people will not benefit at all, in fact they could be worse off by having energy savings products such as cavity wall and loft insulation, being added to their energy bills, whereas at the moment this could be free. They now also appear to using average fuel bills rather than ‘actual,’ so again the losers could be the people who can least afford to pay.

“In reality, adding these costs to energy bills will lead to uncertainty and confusion, and every time an energy bill is increased, by so called external forces such as ‘whole sale gas price rises etc.’, suspicion will fall upon the Green Deal as the reason for rise.”

“The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), have stated that the Green Deal will provide thousands of jobs for Green Deal assessors. I wonder how many of these were victims of the Home Information Packs ( HIPS) fiasco.”