GHG failure has set back energy efficiency

To make a mistake once is forgivable, it’s when it happens twice that people get really annoyed.

This isn’t a column about the government’s faltering approach to lockdowns though but a subject that has attracted much less public attention: the Green Homes Grant (GHG).

The troubled voucher scheme was unceremoniously axed on Saturday night when more of us will have been laughing along to Ant and Dec than worrying about home insulation.

What will be particularly galling for those manufacturers and installers working in the energy efficiency supply chain is that this is the second time in a decade that a government scheme, targeted at their industry, has come a cropper.

Many of them still bear the scars from the coalition government’s equally botched Green Deal energy efficiency loan scheme, which was cancelled by the Conservatives when they sloughed off the Lib Dems after the 2015 general election.

The government was provided with plenty of warnings before Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak unveiled the GHG last summer that it couldn’t afford to mess up the implementation of its new energy efficiency scheme, given the fragile state of confidence in the industry’s supply chain.

Former top BEIS official Tim Lord has told Utility Week that efforts to promote energy efficiency have taken a “step back” as a result of the GHG, which looks like a poor return on the nearly £600 million worth of vouchers likely to have been awarded by the time that the scheme closes.

The timing of the announcement was particularly poor. Even though the scheme’s abandonment had been trailed in ‘The Times’ a few weeks before, announcing it on a Saturday evening left only three working days for installers to chase up households who may have been thinking of taking advantage of the vouchers.

The way the scheme was announced only two days after Parliament had broken up for its Easter break also looked decidedly shifty. Only last week, energy minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan had ducked a question in the House of Commons from her Labour counterpart Alan Whitehead about the fate of the GHG.

The shadow energy minister has also yet to receive a satisfactory answer from the government to his repeated questions about the contract with the GHG’s administrator, American outsourcing firm ICF, which has received the bulk of the blame for the delays that have dogged the scheme. This includes whether the contract to run the scheme was out to an open tender.

The fate of the GHG, announced just in time for the annual Earth Hour mass lights switch off, cannot be easily brushed under the carpet, given that it was being touted as the government’s flagship green recovery policy only a few months ago.

Boris Johnson has put a lot of faith in techno-fixes to tackle the UK’s climate change challenge. The success of the government’s vaccination programme shows that scientific solutions can be, to coin one of the prime minister’s favourite phrases, genuinely “world beating”.

However, cutting emissions will also involve the hard graft of administering solutions, such as home insulation, which are the opposite of glamorous.

And here, echoing the troubled establishment of the Covid test and trace regime, the botched implementation of the GHG scheme offers a less rosy picture. It is deeply troubling that such a potentially important initiative has fallen at the first hurdle. The government will be under pressure to come up with some answers about how it plans to replace the GHG when Parliament reconvenes after Easter.

It could make a start by not trying to dodge questions about how this sorry situation came about.