It looks like the politicians and energy companies are starting to pull at the seams of the Green Deal. The energy companies have delayed implementation of the funding framework that will underpin the Green Deal with its core concept of funding environmentally beneficial home improvements through energy bills. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) are remaining silent in the face of calls to make correspondence about this issue a matter of public record – in response to Shadow Climate Change Minister Luciana Berger’s request Energy Minister Gregory Barker, commented that “we believe that release of this information would prejudice commercial interests“. It is thought that the energy companies are reticent about the scheme in its current form as they have to make extensive changes to their billing systems to handle Green Deal payments AND shoulder most of the risk of non-payment.

There are fears that improvements made through the Green Deal will end up costing homeowners more than equivalent improvements made without the Deal. This is due to the fees payable through the Deal and the commercial rates of interest charged on the loans upon which the Deal is built. Green Deal improvements will be paid for by loans that will then be paid off through energy bills.

Energy Minister Gregory Barker has rebuffed opponents, stating via Twitter that “…Energy Co’s obliged to start collecting #GreenDeal payments from Oct. Its the law!”

Oh and in an update to yesterdays post, the planned launch date is the 1st of October 2012.

With the Green Deal, due to be launched later this year, I thought that an update was in order since I last mentioned it back in March 2011.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) describe the Green Deal as follows:

The Energy Act 2011 includes provisions for the new ‘Green Deal’, which intends to reduce carbon emissions cost effectively by revolutionising the energy efficiency of British properties.

The new innovative Green Deal financial mechanism eliminates the need to pay upfront for energy efficiency measures and instead provides reassurances that the cost of the measures should be covered by savings on the electricity bill.

ECO
A new Energy Company Obligation will integrate with the Green Deal, allowing supplier subsidy and Green Deal Finance to come together into one seamless offer to the consumer.

(From the Department for Energy and Climate Change website – link earlier)

Dates are still a little vague being variously stated as autumn, October or late 2012.

An central concept to the Green Deal is that of a Green Deal Measure :

A Green Deal Measure is an “improvement” made to a property which has been financed through the Green Deal. This can include part-financing, where a customer has chosen to pay for some of the work themselves. However, there will be no standard Green Deal Measure or list of measures that are appropriate for every property. What is appropriate for a property depends on a number of factors including the work already done, the characteristics of the building and in some cases, the geographical location.

More detail can be found in the DECC document What measures does the Green Deal cover?

In other news…

I think it’s fair to say that George Monbiot in the Guardian is not a fan of the scheme…

The green deal is a useless, middle-class subsidy. This deal is in no way green – it’s just one of the means by which money is being taken from the poor and given to the rich

Funding is becoming available, for example, The DECC has stumped up £3m and CITB-ConstructionSkills will provide a further £500,000 towards the training of insulation installers.

There are great aspirations for the number of jobs the Green Deal is likely to create; in March 2011 the Government announced its intention to fund up to 1,000 Green Deal apprenticeships. Longer term, the scheme will support an estimated 65,000 jobs by 2015.

In early March, it was announced that the Green Investment Bank, a new institution tasked with financing investments related to environmental preservation and improvement, would be based in London and Edinburgh. The Bank will play a key part in funding the Green Deal and other environmental initiatives.

According to an article in today’s Telegraph a cross party group of MP’s has been pretty critical of the National Planning Policy Framework, commenting amongst other things that it is “unhelpfully vague” and a “lawyer’s charter”.

The Local Government Committee go on to make the following recommendations:

* Scrapping a clause where developers are given a default “yes” to building in areas where councils have failed to draw up local plans to protect the environment.
* Reinstating a commitment to develop brownfield sites before greenfield ones to help encourage urban regeneration.
* Dropping a clause which allows development to go ahead if it is too expensive to make it sustainable.
* Replacing every sports field built on by developers.

These are all important points – how a default “yes” to building anything anywhere can ever be correct on a small and history packed island like ours escapes me and the “councils have failed to draw up local plans” part is just to open to abuse.

Nice to see this appeal to common-sense – I just hope the Government respond in an equally enlightened, level-headed manner.

Looks like the out-break of PV panels scaling up the roofs of my neighbours houses may be facing a hurdle to further progress. As reported late last week in the Guardian ‘the [subsidy] rate will be reduced from 43.3p per kilowatt hour of solar electricity to just 21p’. This information was contained in a PDF file on the Energy Saving Trust website that seems to have been leaked published prematurely and was removed shortly after publication.

The current subsidy rates will last until at least the 8th of December – so if you’re thinking of getting panels installed, the time for dithering is over…

I’m in two minds about FITs – on one hand PV is a technology I admire, fully support and would like to be able to afford to implement, on the other hand the subsidy scheme and specifically the companies milking it are abhorrent to me. There must be a better way to encourage the take-up of PV? – Perhaps, a subsidy on the panels themselves paid to British manufacturers followed by fixed, fairly price installation?

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that from the 12th of December the rate will be cut to 21p. There’s an informative article (and readable discussion) on the Guardian website.

With the consultation period for the draft proposal now closed, I had the following email from The National Trust a day or two ago.

On Monday, the last day of the Government’s consultation on proposed reforms to our planning system, we went to Downing Street to give the Government our recommendations, backed by an astonishing 210,000 signatures on our petition.

Thanks to people like you, we’ve drawn attention to an important issue that threatens our countryside. When the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was launched in July, there was a big chance that it would go unnoticed. Between us, we’ve made sure it didn’t.

What needs to change?
The draft NPPF sets out to simplify our current planning system and to give local people a greater say in planning in their area. These are good aims. In the process, though, it puts economic goals first in any consideration of planning. It suggests using our planning system as an engine for growth. We want to see a much more balanced document that gives equal weight to social, environmental, and economic needs.

What have we achieved?
So as well as raising awareness of the issue, we’ve begun a national debate over the purpose of the planning system. The Prime Minister has confirmed to us that it should be balanced between those social, environmental and economic needs. This is just the start – we need the next draft of the NPPF to reflect that. It should be published in the New Year.

What’s next?
We’ll continue to keep the pressure on those now reviewing the NPPF, and you can help too. Please do write to your MP to share your concerns. The consultation may be closed, but Ministers are now considering the thousands of responses they have received, so you can let them know you care about the outcome.

I’ve highlighted what I see as the key statement in the third paragraph. I too was troubled by the coupling of the planning system with growth and further with sustainable development when I wrote my summary of the National Planning Policy Framework earlier in the month. With a revised draft document due out in the new year, I’d hope to see further clarity in reference to the relationship between planning, growth and sustainability as promoted by the authors of the Framework. The nature of this relationship as currently described (albeit not always explicitly) seems at odds with much current thought in regard to economic reality, how the public view the planning system and true sustainability.