An analysis of the Green Homes Grant applications show exactly which areas will be hit most when the scheme comes to a sudden finish at the end of today.
The government announced over the weekend that the £1.5 billion GHG programme - which was for landlords and owner occupiers - would end. After launching last September, by the end of last month there were over 123,000 applications for the grants but just 28,000 vouchers had been issued and only 5,800 energy-efficient installations made.
Now a new analysis shows that the North West, North East and Yorkshire & the Humber account for more than 40 per cent of the applications - this compares with just 20 per cent of applications in London and the South East.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit - which made the calculations - says these regions along with the Midlands are also the areas that have some of the highest rates of fuel poverty and greatest proportion of homes below Energy Performance Certificate band C, a target that the government has set for all homes to reach by 2035.
Application rates were highest in the North West (7.2 per 1000 households) and Yorkshire and the Humber (7.3 per 1000 households), compared with just 2.6 per 1000 households in London and 3.0 per 1000 in the South East. The England-wide average is 4.5 applications per 1000 households, government data shows.
Jess Ralston, analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, says: “Pulling the plug on the green homes grant sends the wrong message to many new Conservative voters in the North and Midlands who will unfortunately bear the brunt of broken promises to fix up millions of leaky homes.
“Local communities will also be harmed by the inability to deliver thousands of new skilled jobs, a core tenet of the government’s aims to level up the nation at the same time as bringing emissions down to net zero.
“There is no way to get to net zero without tackling emissions from our homes. Public participation is essential in reaching this goal and so far the government is doing its best to make life difficult for families keen to take action on their carbon footprints.”
And Brian Robson, executive director at the Northern Housing Consortium which represents councils and housing groups, adds: “The North’s homes are older and colder than the national average, so it’s only natural that there were high levels of interest in the Green Homes Grant from our regions.
“The North of England needs an end to stop-start policy on home upgrades: only a long-term commitment to decarbonise our homes will enable us to build the skills and supply chains necessary to undertake this work at scale. If we get that commitment from government, we can create thousands of good green jobs, delivering not just on net zero, but levelling-up too.”
Want to comment on this story? Our focus is on providing a platform for you to share your insights and views and we welcome contributions.
If any post is considered to victimise, harass, degrade or intimidate an individual or group of individuals, then the post may be deleted and the individual immediately banned from posting in future.
Please help us by reporting comments you consider to be unduly offensive so we can review and take action if necessary. Thank you.
.jpg)
%20(002).png)
.png)
Join the conversation
Jump to latest comment and add your reply
Like most of these grant schemes before it the ''Green Homes Grant'' was a complete non starter, waste of time, effort and money.
I was registering as a green homes grant installer. We are Trustmark registered and in the final stages of PAS2030 qualification, and signed up my team for a total of 18 NVQ's for the various retrofit measures. Total cost is >£18k to date and we had a pipeline of works in excess of £470k from people wanting us to complete insulation works. All of this has gone overnight.
Builders were already ware of the scheme after the last green deal fiasco. I really hoped they had learned from this and that the GHG would muster in a new era for the retrofit industry.
Pulling the plug on funding, particularly in this way, has destroyed any faith the building industry has in this. It will now be very difficult to get any SME builders involved in future.
The costs and the loss of income are difficult to bear. How can the government be taken seriously on their green claims if they do this sort of thing at short notice? How can we as a nation hope to hit the net zero target when 20% of emissions come from our homes but there is no joined up policy to address this? The claim from BEIS that they have rolled the money earmarked for GHG into specified other schemes does not bear scrutiny and the obvious spinning of the announcement is harmful to trust in the Conservatives as the party of business and innovation.
So come on Boris et al - YOU MUST DO BETTER.
Andrew
Sorry to hear of your experience. During the last green deal fiasco I learned that none of our local small reputable tradesmen entertained these schemes due to previous bad experience with earlier schemes.
I blame the under 50's for the climate emergency - walking around their homes all winter in summer gear, driving everywhere, heating every room to 25C, multiple foreign holidays every year etc.
Incidentally the cloud storage they use on their fancy phones consumes about as much energy as a small country like Norway or the Netherlands.
When I was young we wore woolly vests and jumpers inside in winter and only heated the living room, letting the fire die down from about 8 pm onwards.
boris is the enemy of all smes
ps there is no climate emergency--its part of nwo and a scam
Hi Andrew
I too am sorry to hear of your experience. Regrettably as a landlord I have found on previous schemes that this is what is likely to happen. The Govt never give enough time for the scheme to begin to get rolling before they pull the plug. I have found that the criteria they impose never fits my situation and several contractors in the past have said they won't get involved in these govt schemes as they are a waste of time from their point of view.
The govt don't seem to have a joined up policy on anything but I fear that a Labour govt will be even worse from a landlords point of view.
Please login to comment