Failure of Green Homes Grant to be investigated

The National Audit Office is to investigate the reasons why the English £2bn Green Homes Grant scheme was suddenly abandoned by the government after just six months. This high-level auditing exercise will consider in particular how the scheme was designed, and whether it could ever have met the objectives set for it by Chancellor Sunak last July,of assisting 600,000 households and ensuring employment for 100,000 people.

Another objective is to look at who precisely did benefit from the scheme, and which energy-saving items were actually installed under it. Just £191m has been spent. While householders made 113,700 applications, only 55 per cent of these were ever approved by the scheme administrators. In the end, just 52,000 homes were improved – only 8 per cent of the Chancellor’s declared target. Around 43 per cent of these were low-income households, where “double” grants of up to £10,000 were available.

Of the measures installed, 81 per cent were insulation, of which 27 per cent were for loft insulation, and 18 per cent for cavity wall insulation. Just 19 per cent were for low-carbon heating. There is little evidence of any installations of “secondary measures” like thermostatic radiator valves or double glazing.

Proportionately the region with the highest uptake was the north west, with the lowest the other side of the Pennines, in the north east.

The NAO team are also set to examine in detail the procurement of the contract for the scheme’s IT platform, and its management.

”The Green Homes Grant was a good initiative, poorly implemented”, concluded the House of CommonsEnvironmental Audit Committee chair Philip Dunne (pictured).

“This government’s green credentials risk being undermined. Simply abandoning a critically important decarbonisation scheme when cracks appear sets a poor example in the year we aim to show climate leadership.

“Cutting emissions starts at home. The homes we live in contribute ahuge amount of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, so undertakingeffective retrofits and stemming those emissions is key to reaching net zero by 2050.”