The cowboys must be licking their lips. Ed Miliband has come up with yet another green homes scheme to chuck public money at subsidised energy improvements. The Warm Homes Plan will allocate £15 billion to grants and low-cost loans for homeowners who want to upgrade their insulation, and fit heat pumps and solar panels. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, not only will it make our homes warmer, it will save homeowners £1,000 a year off their bills.
Ed Miliband has come up with yet another green homes scheme to chuck public money at subsidised energy improvements
Do our leaders never learn? We have had numerous such schemes over the past couple of decades and it is always the same story: the cowboys rush in to scoop up the grants, ruining people’s homes in the process.
Earlier this week, the sorry case of Rachael Wright hit the news. Last May, she received what she thought was the happy news that she qualified for an ECO grant – a scheme introduced by the previous government – to fit insulation, a heat pump and solar panels to her Somerset home. Wright qualified for special treatment because she suffers from asthma. She was told the work would take three weeks. But then her new system started springing leaks. The heat pump kept tripping the electrics. Then, this week, she learned that the company which had done the work on behalf of the government, Consumer Energy Solutions, has gone into administration. She has been left with no heating and mould in her bedroom, something she says it never suffered from before.
Hers is no isolated case. Last October the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report estimating that a whopping 98 per cent of the 22,000-23,000 homes which have had external wall insulation fitted under the ECO scheme will need to have major works to rectify problems with damp and mould caused by poorly-executed work. The same is true of 29 per cent of the homes fitted with internal wall insulation. The NAO blamed ‘an under-skilled workforce, with work being subcontracted to individuals and firms who are not competent of certified; uncertainty over which standards apply to which jobs; and businesses cutting corners when undertaking design and installation work.’
It is perfectly possible to install working heat pumps, to insulate buildings well and to fit effective solar panels – using competent tradespeople. But when these green home schemes are launched we always get the same potent mix which leads to waste and ruination. A large pot of money is suddenly made available with too little consideration as to whether there is an adequate workforce capable of carrying out what in many cases are novel and complex works. Retrofitting old buildings with insulation is very different from building new ones with good insulation, because old homes were often built without damp courses and have solid walls. Wrap up a perfectly functioning old building with impermeable insulation and you are asking for trouble. As for heat pumps, they can work well when integrated into a newly-built home; but it is much harder to get them to work when retrofitted in older, less well-insulated homes without underfloor heating.
At the same time, green homes schemes tend to be targeted at lower-income homeowners who might not be used to employing builders and asking the right questions. The fact that someone other than them is picking up the bill, or much of the bill, makes them less wary than if they were paying the lot themselves. Meanwhile, government is driven by over-ambitious targets to get so many homes up to some notional standard by a certain date that they don’t ask the right questions, either.
Will this time be any different? That is sadly highly unlikely. On the contrary, given the far higher level of funding this time around, there is every reason things could turn out even worse.
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