Whitehead, formerly a member of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, told Utility Week: “The good news, I suppose, is that there is a programme at all, because for a while it looked like there wasn’t going to be a replacement Eco.”
However, he added, the bad news is “it doesn’t look like it’s going to be anything like even the level of Eco”.
He said: “All we’ve got at the moment is the Autumn statement announcement on what Eco might look like post 2017 – £640 million per year and a general target of 200,000 homes treated per year up until 2021.
“That represents roughly a 40 per cent fall on what was Eco expenditure previously, and a much larger fall on what will be the number of houses treated.”
A recent National Audit Office Report said that the Green Deal had “failed to deliver” and “not achieved value for money”. Whitehead agreed, saying: “As it stands at the moment it seems like a pretty ineffective replacement for schemes that themselves were going down below levels that had previously been seen for energy efficiency…when we need those energy efficiency measures like never before.”
He said the demise of Green Deal alongside a “very substantial decrease in funding” will concentrate on “mopping up the relatively easy-to-treat homes… and the hard-to-treat cavity homes could actually take a back seat under the proposals”.
“I think the Association for the Conservation of Energy suggested that on present sort of progress, it would be something like 90 years before we get to the satisfactory level of proper treatment for homes that need it in the country,” he added.
The number of Green Deal installations has dwindled since its closure in July 2015 and Eco is entering its transitional year before a replacement scheme is expected to be introduced in 2018. The industry has been calling for clarity on what the next measures will entail and in January, Lord Bourne told MPs the new energy efficiency scheme will be “centric to fuel poverty” and cost around £640 million, but little else is currently known about the new scheme.