This energy-saving scheme was dreamed up by the Tories to profit City financiers and their chums in the giant energy firms.
I should be at the front of the queue to sign up to the government’s flagship ”green deal” energy-saving scheme, which launches on Monday. I want to reduce my heating and electricity bills, I like the idea of energy saving, and I don’t have the £10,000 it might take to retro-fit my leaky old house with the kit to insulate and warm it efficiently. Yes, I really do want a whizzy new biomass boiler and underfloor heating, and even ground source heat pumps!
So what’s wrong with my getting the work done on a loan that I can pay off monthly over 15-20 years via the savings I stand to make on my bills, and which would be attached to the house rather than to me? No personal risk. No up-front payments. Guaranteed benefits for both me and the planet?
Well, for a start, I don’t trust it. It smacks of the worst kind of market economics. The words “green” and “deal” have been so cynically abused by government, business and financiers in the last 10 years that I can only think it’s another clever instrument dreamed up by the Tories to profit City financiers and their chums in the giant energy companies – the three groups who have fleeced us rotten with their austerity measures, mis-selling and profiteering.
The financial side scares me; but the hidden agenda may be worse. It appears to be to help the corporates take over what used to be known as home improvements. Behind the cosy language of reducing bills, keeping granny warm and helping the poor a massive bureaucracy has been erected, whose effect will be to keep out ordinary tradesman, co-ops and small renewable-energy companies. We are told this is to protect homeowners from sharks and cowboy builders, but it seems designed to ensure only large installation and energy companies profit from the anticipated market.
Even the companies involved in the green deal find it hard to explain how it will work. Here are some of the hoops needed to be jumped: to enter the scheme, you need a green-deal assessor who works for a green-deal adviser organisation to undertake a green-deal assessment of your house, which will result in a green-deal advisory report. This will be lodged with a green-deal provider who will devise a green-deal plan. The work will then be undertaken by a green-deal installer to standards overseen by the new green-deal oversight body.
Blimey. All this to put in a boiler. Whatever happened to the idea of saving up some money and then calling in the local plumber? And just in case you thought this bureacracy comes cheap, you can expect to pay £100-£200 upfront just to get someone to come to your house to tell you what might be needed. And any company wanting to take part in the scheme will be subject to “quality management inspections of back office and frontline delivery”, and will need more certificates than an old general has medals.
My hunch is that the scheme will be a dud. It will appeal to private landlords and to some people wanting to spread the load of a particularly expensive piece of energy-saving kit; but for nearly everyone else, it promises to be over-complicated, burdensome, slow, restrictive, needlessly bureaucratic and open to mis-selling.
There are no guarantees of energy savings, and heaps of uncertainties about what happens if the house is sold or is rented. The government has correctly recognised the massive latent demand for “green” home improvements. Over 100,000 people – myself included – invested in the solar “feed-in tariff” scheme, which was easy to understand, financially attractive and had clear benefits. Until the government panicked at its success and effectively withdrew the subsidy, it created many thousands of jobs and provided work for a whole range of electricians, roofers, scaffolders, solar engineers and renewable energy companies. That new grassroots-led industry, which installed the equivalent of one large new power station in just a couple of years, has now nearly collapsed.
The green deal promises the opposite. We are being encouraged to borrow more money at well over the mortgage interest rate to help the banks profit more. The energy and climate mess we are in has been created by governments and energy companies encouraging profligacy and ignoring energy saving for years. We are now being asked to pick up the bill.
Published by John Vidal for The Guardian on Sunday 27th January 2013.