It's crunch time for the Green Deal. Last week, the government closed its £120m incentive scheme for the Green Deal because it had become inundated with applications for money after the government raised the rates homeowners could claim. The government harboured lofty ambitions of creating a self-funded market for energy efficiency when the Green Deal launched in January 2013 and, most importantly, of moving away from funding this work itself. But the Green Deal struggled to attract customers and, prompted in part by construction industry pressure, the government resorted to a simple cash incentive scheme to try and get it going. Now that the money has run out it seems unlikely that anything will replace it, even if there are fiscally neutral options for creating "structural incentives" to take up, such as changes to council tax.
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