Cameron's climate envoy blames big six energy firms for green deal's failure

The big six energy companies undermined the government’s flagship programme to upgrade the energy efficiency of Britain’s housing stock, according to the former climate minister who is now David Cameron’s climate envoy.

Tory MP Greg Barker told an audience in London on Tuesday that large energy companies had feigned enthusiasm but never seriously tried to sell the green deal to consumers.

“The next five years have all got to be about innovation,” said Barker. “We’re not going to get that from the big six who have no interest in real energy efficiency. My biggest mistake was taking the big six at face value in the early years of this parliament when they said they were interested in energy efficiency. Absolute rubbish. They are not.”

Ed Davey, secretary of state for energy and climate change, who was also on the panel, said he agreed with Barker.

Upon its launch in 2011, Barker said the green deal would be “the biggest home improvement programme since the Second World War”.

The government scheme was designed to help people make their homes more energy efficient by installing new boilers, insulation and solar panels. But the unique financing at the heart of the scheme saw little take-up and the months after launch were hit by IT and legal problems. Five months after the launch, only one of the big six energy providers had rolled out a national green deal programme.

After an unsuccessful green deal trial in Plymouth, Barker said British Gas had told the government “your green deal’s rubbish, we’ve put all our resources in and nobody wants these products”.

But he said where big companies had failed, small ones had succeeded by listening to customers. One small business told Barker that British Gas had “a crap product that nobody wants”. When contacted by the Guardian, British Gas did not want to comment directly on the remarks.

Davey, Barker’s coalition partner, admitted in 2014 that the implementation of the green deal had been “disappointing”. But last night he defended the government’s overall record on energy efficiency, saying that measures running alongside the green deal have seen one million homes improved since January 2013.

Davey said to Barker: “There may have been some firms that weren’t doing as well as they’d hoped but a lot of firms were doing a lot of work and a lot of homes were improved.”

Barker also attacked Labour’s relationship with the big six. He said the previous Labour government had presided over a “massive consolidation” of the energy market from 15 companies to six and Labour’s promise to cap energy prices until 2017 would kill the small businesses that had emerged during this parliament.

“Labour’s price freeze would smash those small new entrant companies. Labour’s price freeze and regulatory approach would only benefit the big six,” he said. “Labour are basically the party of big government solution, of big companies that they want to wrestle with and that they can regulate... And the Tories are on the side of the entrepreneurs,” he said.

Labour’s shadow minister for energy and climate change Jonathan Reynolds replied: “Of all the bad lines these guys have, Labour is the big six is one of the worst... Those 15 companies were regional monopolies so you didn’t have the power to switch energy supplier until Labour won in 1997. That analysis just doesn’t stack up.”