C O N T E X T 1 2 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 2 35 John Preston The Green Deal is coming With the start of the Green Deal due in October, issues relating to historic and traditional buildings, and the competence of those who will advise and work on them, remain unresolved. The Green Deal was announced by Greg Barker MP, climate change minister, as ‘the biggest home improvement programme since the second world war’.The programme provides funding for retrofitting energy-efficient products to domestic or commercial properties. Property owners will not pay any up-front costs, but instead will pay through their energy bills over the lifetime of the products. Businesses will provide the money, being paid back through the energy bills. A ‘golden rule’ will ensure that the property owner never pays more than they would have done if the improvements had not been made. The liability for the debt lies with the property, not the individual. The Green Deal, included in the Energy Bill 2010, came into law in the Energy Act in October 2011 and is due to come into effect in October 2012.The scale is massive: the government expects capital investment of up to £15 billion in the residential sector alone by the end of the decade, with the Green Deal supporting up to a peak of 250,000 jobs.This commitment to the existing housing stock as part of combating climate change is, arguably, long overdue; it has very wide-ranging support in principle. But it is on an incredibly fast-track timescale. As ever, the devil is in the detail. The Green Deal is to be delivered by green deal providers, green deal assessors, and green deal installers.The provider (probably a big name ‘high street’ company) will offer a ‘Green Deal plan’ to customers to finance work recommended by an accredited assessor and undertaken by an accredited installer. How will quality be assured? A very good question, still unresolved with less than six months to go before the Green Deal starts. Green Deal assessors are supposed to provide impartial advice, but will in many cases be working for the Green Deal providers. Installers are likely to be trained by, and in many cases working for, suppliers of retrofit products.There are obvious risks of mis-selling, arising either through lack of understanding of the particular building and what solutions would be appropriate for it, or commercial pressures to install a particular solution whether or not this would be right for the building, or both. The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has been aware of some of the risks.To protect consumers from cowboy operators, the act lays down that all Green Deal participants have to carry a quality mark so that customers know they can be trusted.This quality mark comes in the form of accreditation. Accreditation of what, you ask? The DECC seems to envisage that, with rapid training, energy performance assessors can be accredited as Green Deal assessors. Draft requirements were set out in a British Standards Institute consultation document (Publicly Available Specification PAS 2030) in October 2011. I wrote the IHBC’s strongly critical response to PAS 2030 (see http://ihbc.org.uk/consultations/docs/PDF/ PAS2030revised_response.pdf).This highlighted a series of flaws, including: • Insufficient attention given to the variety of existing building types, notably historic and traditional buildings The insulation is not in a conservation area, but has been applied to the rear and semiprivate gable ends of housing associationowned terraces which have received grant aid for the main elevations. (Photo: Chris Evans, Denbighshire Council)
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