The policy was launched in January as a way of encouraging home owners to improve the energy efficiency of their property by getting new boilers or better insulation. The deal is that they then pay for the work through their fuel bills, which are reduced over the long term.
Latest figures released by the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) show that 71,210 home assessments have been carried out by home owners seeking advice on what savings they could make on their fuel bills from the various measures available to them. However, after eight months, only 12 homes had a live Green Deal plan, in which the energy efficiency measures have been installed and repayments are being made via energy bill savings.
The latest figures shows 677 that finance packages were in the system at the end of August, up from 419 a month earlier. Of these, 293 had had quotes accepted, 372 had plans signed off by the customer, and 12 had had measures actually completed and Green Deal finance plans in place.
After six months, back in June, there were just four Green Deal plans in place after 38,000 assessments. So to have assessments double and plans triple in the next two months was considered good news by energy minister Greg Barker.
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“It is still early days for the new Green Deal market but encouragingly over 71,000 Green Deal assessments have now been completed,” he said.
“There is clearly growing consumer interest but crucially, assessments are also inspiring action – new research this week shows that 81% of households who had a Green Deal assessment said they have, are getting, or intend to install at least one energy saving measure.”
Environmental consultant WSP director David Symons was less impressed. He said: “We’ve hit a plateau of around 13,000 homes entering the Green Deal process every month which isn’t anywhere near enough scale to make it the transformative programme that it could be. Energy and climate change minister Greg Barker calls these figures ‘encouraging’ but we believe that actually it’s far from encouraging – at this rate it will still take 160 years to survey all homes in the UK. Government really needs to up the ante to make this scheme a success, something we all want to happen.”
In May 2011 Greg Barker said: "Such is the scale of this programme that it should reach 14 million homes by 2020 and 26 million homes by 2030. This will herald a rush of new entrants into the energy market like B&Q, John Lewis and Marks & Spencer to challenge the dominance of the big six energy companies but it will also create a huge opportunity for thousands of entrepreneurial, small local businesses to get a piece of this new, multi billion pound market."
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