The UK government has effectively killed its flagship scheme to insulate homes because it says take-up has been too low, but has admitted it has nothing to replace the programme with.
The green deal was hailed as “transformational” and the “biggest home improvement programme since the second world war” by ministers when it was launched in 2013.
But the number of householders taking out the unique loans at the heart of the energy efficiency scheme were much lower than had been hoped, with just over 15,000 issued or in progress according to statistics.
In reality, dodgy firms bombarding us with cold calls urging us to take up a debt. Oh, great. No wonder people didn’t take it up. My Truecall unit blocked these bastards so I didn’t receive any calls anyway – well, more precisely, none ever got through. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
If the politicos would only stop for a moment and think (admittedly not something they have a history of doing a great deal), they’d see that there’s a bit of a clue as to the low uptake in the form of those two little words snuggled in the middle of the paragraph there: “unique loan.” With pretty much the whole world up to its neck in debt, and countless individuals, who other individuals personally know, in deep hock to banks, credit card companies, payday loan companies, mortgage companies, car finance companies or illegal loan sharks, is it really any surprise that the offer to borrow yet more money – no matter how “uniquely” – didn’t exactly strike them as the greatest idea? Mind you, if the Government had offered to foot the bill for all these “improvements” themselves, I bet they would still have had to close the scheme, because they’d been overwhelmed with enquiries. So it was a project which was doomed from the start, really.
As someone over at Bishop Hill pointed out, a reduction on VAT on building materials and building work generally would probably done more good.
I had two visits from a clip-board wielding lunatic from the council, offering to insulate my loft for free. I refused, politely the first time. There’s no such thing as free insulation – someone, somewhere, is having their paycheck dipped into to pay for this nonsense.
Didn’t the egregious Chris Huehne kick this scheme off with wild talk about 26 million homes being insulated and 250,000 ‘Green Jobs’ being created. Wonder what became of him.