23 January 2013

Government’s Green Deal launches Monday, get in quick?

The Government's Green Deal launches on Monday. Improve the energy efficiency of your home and get the government to chip in?

The government's new Green Deal energy efficiency programme officially launches on Monday 28th January 2013. The Green Deal allows you to make energy-saving improvements to you home (or business) without having to pay all the costs up front, the repayments are collected through your electricity bills. Unusually for energy saving measures, there is no means testing to qualify.

The Green Deal is a 4 stage process:

1. Assessment: An approved Assessor will carry out an assessment of your property and identify the cost effective improvements that could be made to your property and outline how the payments work. These assessments are chargeable up front and are expected to be in the region of £85-£150
2. Finance: You can take the report provided by the assessor to approved Green Deal Providers who can arrange and fund the improvements. Your contract will be with the Provider.
3. Installation: The Green Deal Provider arranges for the work to be undertaken.
4. Repayment: Your repayments will be made through your electricity supplier.

The amount of finance that can be offered to a customer is limited by what is known as the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is the principle that the payment instalments should not exceed the estimated savings and that the duration of the loan must not exceed the expected lifetime of the improvements made. Incidentally the loan is registered against the house not the individual, so when you move house the outstanding debt stays with the property. That'll be something to watch out for when moving house – they say it will be shown on the property's Energy Performance Certificate.

The fact that you have to pay for an assessment which may or may not identify any opportunities for improvement suitable for the Green Deal is liable to put some prospective customers off and means the scheme may be more suited to larger scale improvements.

One disadvantage of this scheme is that in order for Repayments to be made, you will need to pay for your electricity through an energy company that has signed up to the Green Deal. At the time of writing just three of the big six: British Gas, EDF Energy and nPower are registered as Providers. Southern Electric / SSE have registration in progress. E.On say they will "support part of the Green Deal” though we don't know which parts. Scottish Power make no mention of the Green Deal.

Smaller providers have not signed up. First-Utility and Ovo Energy say they "support aspects” of the Green Deal but are not registered Providers and you can't register interest with them.

To help kick-start the process, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have an initial £40m pot of money to fund the Green Deal Cashback Scheme. It is a first-come, first served scheme paying fixed levels of cashback for specific improvement. Once the initial funding has been exhausted, there will be more but the levels of cashback will be reduced. So if you're interested, it may pay to get in quick.

One of Ovo Energy's concerns in their response to the Green Deal consultation was that they felt: "there should be an obligation for Green Deal advisors to inform a customer if there is a cheaper energy tariff for them”.

Couldn't agree more and we're happy to help: www.moneymaxim.co.uk/energy.

Author: Andrew Daniel