Energy secretary Amber Rudd has revealed that a replacement for the Green Deal has been lined up for release early next year.
She made the announcement when pressed for details on upcoming policies during an energy and climate change select committee hearing earlier today, the majority of which centred around the details of a leaked letter which Rudd confirmed was accurate.
However the committee also sought to clarify when replacement programmes for those axed since May would be going active. Antoinette Sandbach asked when a Green Deal successor would be launched, to which Rudd replied that she hoped one would be active possibly by the end of this year, but by early next at the latest.
The Green Deal was much maligned for its apparent failure to meet its aims, but its cancellation with no immediate replacement has left a policy gap for promoting the adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency measures.
Last week Energy Savings Trust chief executive Philip Sellwood gave his opinion that the Green Deal was “not a complete failure” but was too weighted as a financial product, and said that any emerging successor should be advertised more appropriately as a measure to increase home comfort and wellbeing.
Meanwhile Rudd also shrugged off concerns over the success of the UK’s smart meter rollout and insisted that every household in the UK would be fitted with a device by 2020. It is estimated that just 1.3 million smart meters have been installed in the UK to date, far short of that ambition.
Yesterday Ofgem announced that E.ON had been fined £7 million for failing to deliver on its own targets of delivering smart meters to its business customers.