Leader

摘要

In a still-recovering economy, where growth and employment are at the heart of the political agenda, the words of the boss of one of the UK's largest insulation installers this week should be a warning that echoes around the corridors of Whitehall. Announcing that his company is being forced to make a quarter of its UK staff redundant, Mark Group's chief commercial officer Bill Rumble pinned the blame squarely on changes in the government's energy efficiency policies. He emphasized that the firm had scaled up to meet demand expected to be driven by the Energy Companies Obligation (ECO) scheme, one of the government's flagship retrofit programmes, that had not materialised as a result of cuts to the scheme. He then said that the company would need to "operate with a smaller workforce until there is a clear and consistent approach to energy efficiency policy".