Home insulation project to ease global warming heading for meltdown

Published on Saturday 26 September 2009 21:07

A HIGH-profile campaign at the heart of the Scottish Government's campaign to bring down damaging carbon emissions is in meltdown just six months after it begun, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

Questions about the Home Insulation Scheme have shown that government officials believe that it will now take 66 years to bring all Scotland's homes up to a minimum standard – 25 years after it is supposed to have reduced CO2 emissions by 80 per cent.

They also show that the Scottish Government will miss UK targets to insulate new homes and no house will be insulated until the middle of winter in December.

The scheme was set up with an initial 15 million in the last budget to kickstart provision of insulation to homes across Scotland and was supposed to provide help for 90,000 homes over the next two years. It was finance secretary John Swinney's cut-price response to a Green proposal for a 1 billion scheme to insulate all homes free of charge over a decade, replicating a successful scheme by Kirklees Council in Yorkshire.

The rejected Green scheme would have reduced emissions by 5.85 per cent every year, helping Scotland reaching its tough national target of 42 per cent by 2020. Ministers now admit that their programme will at best achieve 0.7 per cent of reductions a year.

The Greens' scheme would have also supported 4,700 jobs and saved households an average of 340 a year in heating costs.

The dispute between the two parties on the scheme was one of the reasons that the budget was dramatically voted down at the first attempt in February.

And in the end Swinney only offered 15 million for it and made it a loans scheme instead of one which was free of charge.

At the time the Greens claimed that the SNP's scheme would fail because it maintained barriers of people having to pay and ask for insulation which stopped many homes being adapted.

Now they claim their worst fears have come true with written answers revealing the scheme is in chaos.

Civil servants have admitted they have only found 750,000 of the 15m match funding to pay for the scheme and the loans scheme has not been set up after six months of waiting.

Ministers have also admitted that more than one third of the 15m of government money will go on administration and not all the remaining 9.5m will be spent on energy efficiency measures. Scottish ministers also admit they will not meet the UK government's 2015 target on insulation.

Green MSP Patrick Harvie said: "We always feared that the Scottish Government's scheme was being set up to fail, but the flaws with it are now clearly on a scale beyond even our worst fears. It seems that ministers are more concerned about justifying their political decision not to support Green proposals than actually providing insulation to cut people's bills.

"Their scheme makes just a seventh of the investment we proposed, but it's fourteen times less effective at cutting carbon and cutting people's bills."

He added: "Ministers promised parliament that their scheme would entice a matching 15m from partner organisations, but they now admit that just a twentieth of that will actually arrive. Will they now at least make up the difference?"