For the past three years SE2 has helped us deliver our Healthy Homes Initiative. Their understanding of the issues around fuel poverty, ability to communicate clearly to different stakeholders and willingness to go that extra mile has contributed massively to the initiatives success and made them an ideal partner.
Steve Shaffelburg, Inner North West London PCTs
So long, Green Homes Grant… What’s next?
And so we say farewell to the Green Homes Grant, announced in July, launched in September, extended in November, cancelled in March. It was short and not particularly sweet and not entirely unpredictable, though the timing may have been a surprise even to energy efficiency geeks like me.
The big question is: what’s next?
If Government is serious about decarbonization, then it has to be serious about energy efficiency. And if it is serious about energy efficiency then it has to put in place the incentives, marketing, infrastructure, supply chain and resources to deliver. Easy to write in a blog post, hard to deliver, but here are some principles to guide the journey:
1. Commit for the long term
The biggest finding from pretty much every household incentive programme over the past 15 years has been “you’ve got to give it time”. You can’t ramp up accredited supply chains, consumer demand, financial support and good old fashioned trust in a six-month window. Government has to recognize that consumer incentives will take time to gain traction – perhaps even longer than a Parliamentary term. The Feed In Tariff was given the best part of ten years to run, with incentives for purchasers of PV that would continue to pay out over 20+ years. It helped to bring the costs of PV down from c£15,000 per property to around £4-5,000; it helped stimulate community ownership of and participation in the energy system; and it made PV a feature of pretty much every town in the country. Was it perfect? No, but it was at least given time to learn.
2. No alarms and no surprises
It turns out that people don’t like surprises. Customers have taken a big step to invest their own money in energy efficiency improvements – and get scared when the rug is pulled from under them. Supply chains have invested in staff, training, accreditation and equipment – and face the choice of going bust, getting out of the industry or reverting to the safer space of fully subsidized work in the fuel poverty space. Think back to the big surprises – the cancellation of FIT and Green Deal. Their effects linger in people’s memories, particularly in the memories of supply chain companies who have invested over and over again and been burnt each time. Maybe they bounce back when the next grant scheme comes along, and maybe you have new entrants. But this back and forth does not create a solid and secure foundation of energy efficiency businesses who have the confidence to scale up to what we need to meet our national climate change goals (let alone the ambitions of local areas with more ambitious decarbonization targets).
3. Design with people, not for people
Sending out tick-box consultation papers is not co-design.
Getting people together to thrash out ideas, tweak, test, challenge, add: this is how you’re going to get to schemes which are going to have buy-in from the supply chain and other partners who you’re relying on to deliver on the ground. Get the installers in the room. Get the marketeers in too. Get the local authorities and the energy agencies and the green groups and the insulation installers and the heat pump manufacturers and the architects: get them all in and get them all working to design something that they believe is going to be game-changing. I’ve had the privilege of working with some great policymakers across all aspects of energy and buildings: but only a handful know the practicalities of an energy efficiency project. Bring people into the room from the very start and make them real partners in design as well as delivery.
A final thought
Every successful policy has its flaws and every flawed policy has its successes. That’s part of what makes this whole thing so unpredictable: you never know which balance you’re going to get. Things don’t always turn out as you imagined – and I’m not going to criticize Government for withdrawing something that’s simply not working (nor for putting more funding through local authorities and housing providers for delivery of energy efficiency projects).
Government spends a lot of money evaluating policies and programmes but isn’t always great at taking the findings of those evaluations on board. It’s OK to get it wrong; it’s not OK to keep getting it wrong. We all know what Einstein said about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
Farewell, Green Homes Grant. What’s next?