Is Chris Huhne selling a pup on green deal?

Chris Huhne is very proud of the Green Deal, his flagship policy on energy efficiency, which is currently being debated in the House of Lords. He says it is "the most ambitious energy saving plan ever put forward. A once-and-for-all refit that will make every home in Britain ready for a low-carbon future."  But is he selling us a pup?

No bad thing that the Government is enthused about ambitious action on our leaky homes and buildings. A quarter of the UK's emissions come from our homes, and 4.5 million people now live in fuel poverty.

But is the Green Deal the answer? Well, there's a rather large snag. No-one - not even Mr Huhne and his team - knows whether the Green Deal will even work.   And even if it does work, the Government isn't telling anyone what they think the Green Deal would actually deliver.

Under the Green Deal, householders will be offered loans to improve their properties, repaid through energy bills. The theory goes that with no upfront money needed and the hassle factor greatly reduced through a new accreditation regime, millions will sign up.

But the devil really is in the detail, and the Green Deal as shown to the House of Lords is astoundingly light on that. There's no overall level of ambition, and it isn't part of a bigger strategy which commits the Government to anything. No wonder the esteemed members of the upper House have been getting rather hot under the ermine about it.  

The Government admits that it doesn't know whether consumers will actually be interested in the Green Deal.  They're right: people will be repaying Green Deal loans at whatever interest rate the market comes up with. Research shows that getting people interested means you'll have to keep the interest rates really low: only at something like 2% a year will potential punters start to be attracted.   If one day there's a flourishing Green Deal market with millions of people wanting to take out loans, there's a possibility the market could get close to that kind of rate. But getting there means the Government will have to put its hand in its pocket to subsidise the scheme, or offer financial incentives like a council tax rebate, or minimum standards for energy efficiency, or all three. 

And even if people do take it up, what's the Government's mark of success?   They don't seem to have one, or not one they're prepared to share.  There's no target for how many homes they want to see improved under the Green Deal, nor to what depth of energy efficiency improvement.  The plan is just to "set up the structure and see how we proceed". That's not good enough.   

Mr Huhne has an awful lot of convincing to do to win the argument that the Green Deal is really up to scratch. It's just too vague at the moment, and isn't even part of what we really need - a decent strategy for delivering whole-house, genuinely once-in-a-lifetime retrofits.  There's too much urgency to get this one wrong.