Labour blast Grant Shapps’ £6,500 Green Refit Loan as a ‘Con’

The subject of the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘green’ policy that will offer the consumer loans up to £6,500 to refit their homes with energy saving measures received reference today in the second reading of the Energy Bill.

Greg Clarke, the Conservative Party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, could not resist the temptation of repeating details of the scheme that Mr Shapps, the Shadow Housing Minister, had unveiled a couple of weeks’ ago. He said:

‘We will allow every household in the country up to £6,500 in approved energy efficiency insulations, and the system will be conditional on money being saved on their bills during the payback time. That is a win-win situation’.

Responding, Edward Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, stated the difference between me and the hon. Gentleman is that I recognise that this proposal will have a cost: we are providing £4 million to make those pilots possible. This comes back to image versus substance. He wants to claim that he can give £6,500 to every household in the country, costing up to £180 billion, and that it will cost no public money. That is clearly a con’

Dr. Alan Whitehead, for labour added: ‘we have heard the suggestion -it was repeated this afternoon-that every household should be given £6,500, and that that will sort out the whole question of insulation and active energy generation concerns. As a result, it is suggested, we will have fully insulated and approaching zero-carbon households, but it is akin to the other short-lived policy we heard about a while ago, whereby everybody was to put £8,000 into the pot and they would then have their health and social care needs taken care of for the rest of their lives. That policy ran into similar mathematical difficulties. The mathematics of the £6,500 policy-over and above requiring loan guarantees of some £160 billion to £170 billion to be injected into the economy if the guarantee is from the public purse-would require savings of £360 a year, if the loan is to be serviced and assuming that it would not be just given out to householders’.

It is clear, or should be, that the Conservative Party’s policy for ‘green’ reform should not be accepted at face value. As with policies of this type the devil is within the detail.