Green Deal needs ‘radical overhaul’ by new government, says EUA

The energy efficiency Green Deal scheme needs a ‘radical overhaul’ and is a ‘critical issue’ that the new energy minister must address, the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA) has said.

EUA’s chief executive Mike Foster told Utility Week that the Green Deal has ‘failed to live up to expectations’ by placing ‘barriers’ to home improvements in the form of bureaucracy and red tape and needs to be quickly replaced by the new government.

The latest government statistics showed that only 12,076 households had Green Deal Plans in progress at the end of March 2015, more than two years after the scheme was launched.

Foster said: “Any new government coming in at the end of this week has got to look at what the Green Deal objectives were supposed to be and ask themselves a very hard question about whether there is a better way of delivering them.”

The EUA wants to see any Green Deal replacement remove three key barriers to delivery. Firstly it is calling for the removal of the ‘bureaucratic’ accreditation scheme Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 2030, which the EUA says is ‘unnecessary’ and has resulted in very few accredited gas heating engineers.

It argues that using existing schemes, such as Benchmark, already prove engineers’ competency, and would benefit the industry by removing “some of the red tape”.

Foster said: “To just ignore 97 per cent of firms dealing with the installation of heating products just seems a bit daft. You want 100 per cent engagement from those small firms and businesses and then you have some great salespeople for the scheme.

“If you’ve then got 135,000 people arguing for the Green Deal, as opposed to in effect being resistant to it, that’s got to be a better way of marketing this scheme.”

Secondly the EAU is calling for zero percent interest rates to make the scheme an ‘attractive proposition’ and encourage uptake.

Lastly it is calling for targeted support to make it ‘very attractive’ to householders to replace the 2-3 million ‘zombie’ boilers currently in UK households that it currently remains cheaper to run and repair than replace.

The EUA said it would also support the introduction of free energy assessments and the introduction of more community or local government-led schemes, however the EUA believes local authorities lack the resources to support such an approach.

“Local government has been squeezed in terms of its resources, so to ask them to undertake additional work, may not be the most appropriate thing to do unless there are some resources coming their way, so whoever comes along might have to rebuild the local authority infrastructure,” Foster added.

“I would argue that that is a critical issue that any new government will have to address very quickly. I would like to think that within a couple of months we would at least be consulted on what would replace the Green Deal.”