The Green Deal is making progress with 1 803 home assessments completed since January, according to figures published this week by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Its first regular monthly Green Deal statistical update showed 1,729 assessments were conducted in February, with the rest carried out in January.
And in related news, Green Deal providers learned this week that they now have access to £244m in loan facilities to finance Green Deal Plans for their customers.
The funding, arranged by the Green Deal Financing Company, a not-for-profit dividend company, has been provided by several lenders, including the government’s £3bn Green Investment Bank. Providers should be able to draw down the funds before the end of March in time for the first refurbishment work to start.
The DECC bulletin shows that the Green Deal supply chain has also grown, with 77 registered assessors employing a total of 619 Green Deal Advisers. The number of Green Deal Providers, which quote for improvements and draw up contracts with homeowners, has now reached 40, while there is now a total of 629 accredited installer organisations to carry out the remedial work.
Meanwhile, the Green Deal’s sister scheme, the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), which replaces the existing CERT and CESP programmes, has also awarded £26.9m of contracts for work in the first two months of 2013, the figures showed.
Commenting on the statistics, John Alker, director of policy at the UK Green Building Council, said: “It’s great to see the momentum building behind the Green Deal and ECO. While much of this activity will have been driven by DECC-funded local authority projects, it still demonstrates that the public are taking note of the scheme and getting involved.
“Similarly, the rising number of accreditations shows that businesses are seeing a real opportunity in this market. And we must remember that each training course, assessment, and installation is helping industry to gain experience and build capacity that will stand the scheme in good stead for the years to come.”
But Alker is also looking to the government to create additional Green Deal incentives in next week’s budget. “The initial rush provided by these early projects, and the subsequent take-up driven by the cash-back scheme is likely to prove unsustainable in the long-term if government fails to put in place lasting, structural incentives. We would hope to see proposals in this respect included in next week’s budget.”
The Green Deal Finance Company this week confirmed that it had raised £244m to fund Green Deal Plans, although there was speculation in the press that the government’s Green Investment Bank had supplied less debt than the GDFC consortium had hoped for.
A spokesperson for the company told CM: “We expect that given the time it will take to assess, install and certify a Green Deal, the earliest Providers will need finance will be late March so there is no delay to consumers, assessors or providers in being able to start the process.”
Providers will have to pay GDFC a set up charge of £63 for each Green Deal Plan and an annual operating charge of £20. “They may choose to add this to the overall cost of finance to the household, depending on the size and length of the Green Deal Plan,” the spokesperson added.
Although GDFC would not reveal the interest rates to be charged on loans taken out by Green Deal Providers, underlying interest rates charged to consumers will start at 6.96% per annum. Actual interest rates are likely to be higher for small Green Deal work packages than larger ones.
