Last night we attended the ‘Greening the Green Deal’ put on by ‘The Greening Campaign’ and attended by Caroline Lucas Green MP. All very green!
Speakers for DECC, Brighton Council and Marksman Consulting all gave their views on the forthcoming Green Deal and requested that we all put in to the consultation process to ensure that it becomes a tenable structure to enable building owners and tenants to reduce their carbon emissions through structured charges on the energy bill, which will have a guaranteed effect (“The Golden Rule”) on lowering their bills and carbon emissions.

The consultation documents are available from:

http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/consultations/green_deal/green_deal.aspx

From our perspective the Green Deal is a challenging framework where a lot of disparate parties will need to come together with community engagement at its heart and a robust finance mechanism to keep it all together. The Energy Assessors must be independent and the system of assessment must be suitably robust to ensure that the golden rule is met, we know the methodology will be a form of SAP rating but there needs to be QA in place, unlike the current SAP methodology.

The current risks are that the big players just come in with their in-house assessors and promote their products / methods to attain the work, this must not happen.
The green deal must promote local businesses and professionals as much as the big players, if it does not then an air of distrust may prevail among the potential audience (you and me) and there won’t be the uptake.

At last night’s meeting it was noted that for a council / community group / A N Other to get the financial model to work approximately 15000 homes would be needed, this is a tall ask, thus we believe that if we can join up the community engagement groups, co-operatives and the council we can start to make the Green deal work for us.

We made it on to the Technology Strategy boards list for building performance evaluators

https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/building-performance-evaluation/bpevaluators-register

Many thanks to all those who stopped by our stands at the Move or Improve Show, and at the fantastic HKD (Hassocks Keymer Ditchling) Transition Octoberfest.

Congratulations to Ms A Scott of Rottingdean who was the number out of the hat for our bottle of Nyetimber.