Who is going to deliver the Green Deal?

There is not a single building engineer working today who meets the Green Deal competence criteria...

There are also no courses available to train them; and the way the projects are structured means that householders could be left with no water or heating for weeks. Other than that – it is all looking great!

With just five months to go until the launch of the Government’s ‘flagship’ environmental policy, there are big question marks over how the scheme can be delivered.

The difficulty is that the competence criteria have been set in line with new national qualifications that are not yet in place. As a result, nobody can be measured against the requirements of PAS 2030 – the ‘publicly available specification’ for existing buildings, which provides the quality standards to which all energy efficient measures funded by the Green Deal must be installed.

The PAS covers boilers, controls, insulation, warm air heating systems, flue gas recovery systems, lighting, heat pumps, solar thermal and PV, biomass boilers, CHP and wind. It sets out the installation processes, the management of those processes and the quality of the service provided to the customer before, during and after the installation. This is to ensure that installations meet customer expectations and achieve theGolden Rule that states the energy savings must cover the cost of repaying the money, provided by the scheme for the improvements.

Benchmark
The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) depends on the PAS to guarantee the standards required by the Green Deal Code of Practice and as a good practice benchmark for installations. Yet, it could be as much as four years before the first candidates come through the qualification process. We are facing a huge hole in DECC’s strategy for delivering its ‘flagship’ environmental policy.

The irony is that there will be plenty of money available because large private organisations are lining up to provide Green Deal funding – Marks & Spencer; B&Q and the like – but what will they be funding? There is no point having lots of money, but a very narrow supply chain – if any supply chain at all – capable of delivering the projects.

The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is facing a similar problem with £600m of public money available, but only a handful of applications. Only 20 projects – out of a total of 376 applications – have so far been approved for RHI payments and almost all of these are for biomass installations, according to Ofgem who are administering the scheme.

So, plenty of money, but precious little output.

Damaging
Contractors are sensitive to this sort of thing and their scepticism could be really damaging because of the Government’s patchy record on subsidised schemes.  It is hard to persuade employers to pay for yet more training if they get even a whiff that there is doubt over the long-term viability of the scheme – and that’s when the training courses actually exist!

The Government’s intentions are good, but this betrays their lack of understanding about how the industry works.

This is also evident in how the project process has been set up. If a contractor working on a Green Deal funded project comes across a problem during the project – say, for example, he finds asbestos or the boiler needs to be re-sited because of a previously hidden problem with a wall – he will have to go back to the Green Deal provider for approval.

This means a delay and could result in the householder being without heating or water until the person or organisation providing the funds has re-assessed the application and approved the changes. This has come about because the system has been set up to protect the funding providers – not the consumer.

Mandatory
Another opportunity has also been missed over the long-awaited ‘consequential improvements’. The industry has lobbied for these to become a mandatory requirement under Part L of the Building Regulations. The principle is that the building owner is compelled to spend a further 10% of the value of any refurbishment project on improving the energy efficiency of the whole building.  With Green Deal funding now available, here was an opportunity to impose the rule, but without any cost to homeowners.

By making it a legislative requirement, the government could have created a measure of compulsion, but Green Deal funding would have been used to pay for the improvements and consumers would have enjoyed the benefits of reduced fuel bills as well.  However, the Daily Mail dubbed it a ‘conservatory tax’ and so, despite widespread support during the Part L consultation process – including from several government departments, the Chancellor intervened and had the proposal dropped.

Solutions
So we have a whole list of concerns – but what about solutions? The flaws in the scheme will become increasingly apparent once it gets up and running because the uptake will be sluggish. There will, surely, have to be some sort of ‘staging’ process to allow already competent engineers to carry out the work before they complete further training.

B&ES will continue to raise these concerns and lobby for changes during the early stages. However, in the meantime, we recognise that you have to be on board the train as it is the government’s flagship measure and a large amount of work is linked to it. There is no point standing on the platform shouting.

With this in mind, our accreditation service BESCA is about to receive UKAS approval as a Green Deal accreditor to add to its approvals for the Microgeneration Certification Scheme(MCS) and mandatory air conditioning inspections.

We will not snipe from the sidelines. We recognise that the Government’s intentions are good, but that it needs more expert guidance from within the industry. We can provide that while also setting up the accreditation processes that will, in time, be better suited to the way projects can and should be delivered leading to a long-term work stream for building engineering services contractors.