Clean Heat Grant - Latest
Clean Heat Grant (again!) latest update!
Exactly as I predicted almost exactly a year ago (see below) the House of Lords' Climate Change Committee has found the scheme to be inadequate ( even by its own, inadequate, ambition). The criticism is on the grounds of inadequate publicity - so that many people didn't know. There is also inadequate capacity that currently cannot deliver even half the 30,000 when 500,000 a year are required to meet the publicly stated "target". The scheme is also criticised for bureaucratic hoop-jumping that makes it so difficult to qualify eg. the demand for insulation (unaided) that locks the poorest out from affording this.
The inadequate ambition, inadequate publicity, inadequate capacity and bureaucratic problems reveal this to be just another case of "something to announce" to fool the public into believing " the Government is doing something (INADEQUATE)". Now who could have thought that? This reveals the Government's "Green "credentials as being totally threadbare.
Original article:
The Government's "Clean Heat Grant" scheme comes into operation from April 1st 2022. However no-one will be able to apply for the £5000 grant until May 23rd. This means that only the richest, who can afford to shell out £10,000 and just hope that they will land the grant in the future, will be able to start work on installing a heat pump in the next few weeks.
So not only we get a scheme where the most certain winners will be the richest but the scope of the scheme (only 30,000 a year for 3 years when actually 500,000 a year are needed to hit publicly stated policy) is so limited that it is just a case of having "something to announce" so that the Government can say "we are doing something" when in reality what they are doing is hopelessly inadequate.
The poorest half of the population will never be able to afford the £5,000, even under this scheme, to install a heat pump. And the use of the £5,000 subsidy is not even the best use of the money towards the "Net Zero for carbon dioxide" target. To be able to instal a heat pump to work effectively your house needs to be well insulated. But many of the poorest live in the worst insulated houses which currently are not suitable for heat pumps. What the poorest need is something like the Green Homes Grant scheme that the Government sabotaged a year ago.