When the government first launched its Green Deal, it was part of its ‘greenest government ever’ pledge, which ministers seem to have forgotten about entirely now. The programme of energy efficiency improvements is looking rather green, but in a peaky sense, rather than because it is successfully greening this country’s homes. The latest figures show only 36 households had signed up to the Green Deal by the end of June, which is hardly the most impressive take-up for a programme that is supposed to have attracted 10,000 sign-ups by the end of this year.
Some programmes do take a while to get off the ground, but it’s worth noting that the two Coalition parties do like to blame one another for the stuttering start to this one. Even though the Tories unveiled their plans for a green deal at their 2009 autumn conference, they now privately think the Lib Dems mucked it up. Unusually, they mutter that the Lib Dems believed too much in the power of the market to lift this programme up, while they wanted to introduce the deal through the social housing sector. Doing the latter would have given the project momentum, which Tories working on the deal hoped would drive down costs and encourage more providers into the market as well. The disagreement over how to roll out the green deal is one of those Coalition sores over something rather technical that the public will likely never notice, but it’s something ministers like to gossip about. ‘Whoever mucked it up, they’ve mucked it up,’ one Tory minister observing the proceedings remarked to me recently.
Either way, it’s perhaps just as well ministers don’t bother talking about the ‘greenest government ever’, as the figures for this programme would hardly back up this claim.
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