I thank the Minister for her introduction of this order and for her very comprehensive explanation of what it achieves and why it is needed. We fully support it and have very little to say other than it is purely a technical amendment to maintain continuity and to keep things functioning in the light of consequential amendments arising from changes to another piece of legislation.
We still hope that the Green Deal will succeed in its intended aims. It got off to a slow start but there are now signs that it might be picking up a little. In general, we are fully behind the Government’s attempts
to try to bring about a successful policy that encourages consumers to undertake energy efficiency improvements under the pay-as- you-save model. It is important to keep it under review and there will obviously be a point when fundamental changes will have to be assessed to show whether enough people are coming forward.
We are concerned that if this policy is only ever taken up in a small pocket of households it will not become normalised, and there is a risk that people who want to sell property with a Green Deal might have to take a penalty and be unable to realise the true value of their house because of fear over this mechanism. It is likely that that will be the case in the early days of the policy. Therefore, it is important that we have cross-party consensus to try to ensure that we do not see a class of stranded consumers. We will come back to that general point in the future when we have the opportunity to discuss other technical amendments in policy-related debates, but for now we have no problems with this order.