What's in a name?

The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne has helped launch a new report showing industry could save £6 billion a year through energy efficiency.  The report is available here.

But what caught my eye was the fact Mr Huhne said at the launch that he had wanted the Energy Bill currently before Parliament to be called the Energy Saving Bill.

Personally, I would prefer it if Mr Huhne changed the content of the Bill to ensure it saves more energy, rather than worry about what it is called.

The central energy saving measure in the Energy Bill is the Green Deal.  This will let people borrow money to insulate their home and pay it back through payments added to their energy bills.  The idea is that these Bills still end up lower than before, because the repayments will be less than the amount of money you save as a result of the improved insulation.  So everyone is a winner!

The problem is that the Government wants commercial companies to provide the loans, and they (quite reasonably) want commercial loan rates.  Which means higher repayments, so only the faster payback improvements can be carried out.

That usually means loft insulation and cavity wall.   They are good things of course, but energy companies who have been required to fit them under current obligations have been virtually giving this stuff away for years, and are finding it harder and harder to get people to take up their offers.  Ask them in private if the offer of a new loan is going to transform this and you get very sceptical answers.

But as the doubts grow, has Chris Huhne changed his plans?  Has he promised to limit the interest rates perhaps, or offer additional tax incentives that make the system pay better?  Has he put requirements on Councils to deliver carbon savings in their area that would encourage them to promote the Green Deal and get it taken up in their area? Or required private landlords to use the Green Deal to improve the homes they rent out - a sizeable proportion of which are so badly insulated that environmental health officers consider them health hazards?

Well, no.  Chris Huhne has called the Green Deal "a revolution", and claimed it would create up to 250,000 jobs working on the "once-and-for-all refit that will make every home in Britain ready for a low-carbon future".  But rhetoric alone will not deliver anything like what we need.

Don't get me wrong, the Green Deal is - in its limited way - a good thing.  But there is precious little evidence it do more than help out a few households keen to insulate their homes, but without the ready cash to pay for it.

Which brings us back to the title of the Bill.  In the past, I too have had trouble with the titles of Bills.  In 2003 a stern-faced Commons official told me that Friends of the Earth's new recycling law - requiring every household in the UK to get doorstep recycling - could not be called the Doorstep Recycling Bill.  The reason?  It did not require the recycling of doorsteps.

We'll probably never know if a similar official told Mr Huhne his Energy Bill wouldn't save any energy.  But we must keep pressing him to improve it until it does.