Guardian: “It would be, the climate minister said, the “biggest home improvement programme since the second world war” and “a massive economic and job opportunity”. But the Green Deal, launched in January last year as the government’s main way of encouraging householders to make their homes more energy efficient, has been more of a whimper than the “transformational” scheme that Greg Barker promised.”
“While more than 100,000 people have signed up for the first stage of the deal – an assessment where an expert visits their property to see which energy-saving measures it would benefit from – a minuscule number have taken out the financing that makes the scheme unique. By the end of November, just 458 households had finished the process of having works such as new boilers and insulation installed, along with the loan that pays for the upfront cost.
The scheme did not get off to a good start. Four in five people had not heard of it at its launch, despite months of ministers talking it up. Legal and IT problems dogged the first few months, as the financing at the heart of the scheme proved much more complicated to set up with individual companies than expected. Five months after its launch, only one of the ‘big six’ energy providers had fully launched a national programme offering the Green Deal.
….In effect, it has mostly amounted to a second round of the 2010 boiler scrappage scheme. Of the 8,456 measures fitted in homes that people claimed cashback for under the scheme, an incredible 94% were for boilers. It is a far cry from Barker’s promise of: “A radical new approach to home energy improvement, moving away from pepper potting individual measures to whole house or property solutions”.”
But a spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “The Green Deal has not just been about selling finance plans. It has been a call to action to help people make their homes more energy efficient. More than 80% of people who had Green Deal assessments have been happy with the result.”
He added that the relatively low number of people who moved on to take out a Green Deal loan is open to misinterpretation. Many people have obtained an assessment but then chosen to finance improvements themselves, or installed just one or two of the measures recommended. A formal assessment of the Green Deal published this week found that of the 76,6485 households assessed between launch and September 2013, between 58,000 and 64,000 had installed at least one recommended measure, or definitely/probably intended to install one.”
