Yesterday DECC made the following documehts publically available for comment:

·       A specification for the provision of Green Deal Advisor Services; and

·       Guidelines for Certification Bodies who will certify against the specification.

Obviously the big one - the Consultation document itself - is still eagerly awaited, but for those of you with an interest in Green Deal assessments, well worth a look. I'll post some thoughts on the docs when I have had time to read them!

Below is the email sent with the documents, along with the drafts themselves.

Dear Sir/Madam

I am writing to you as I understand you have an interest in Green Deal and the Green Deal assessment. One of the key workstreams in this area has been the certification of the work of Green Deal Advisors (GDA), who will carry out the assessments.  DECC will shortly be consulting on the Green Deal as a whole, but alongside this we are also developing the detail of what will be needed to deliver this aspect of the framework, seeking targeted input from stakeholders.

Certification Bodies will certify that an individual GDA or company employing multiple GDAs is capable of providing the Green Deal assessment to an agreed standard. To maintain consistent, high quality Green Deal assessments the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) has already been appointed to accredit Certification Bodies to the standard EN 45011 and additional requirements being developed for Green Deal.

UKAS are piloting the proposed certification framework and in support of this DECC has been working on the following draft documents:

·       A specification for the provision of Green Deal Advisor Services; and

·       Guidelines for Certification Bodies who will certify against the specification.

The specification explains how organisations shall be expected to deliver the GDA Service and the Certification Body guidelines explain how Certification Bodies shall be expected to monitor compliance against the specification.Please find drafts of these documents attached. It is important to note the following:

·       These are DRAFTS and should not be regarded or used as agreed standards;

·       As we have not yet formally consulted on Green Deal, a number of areas of policy are to be finalised and we have attempted to highlight these areas throughout;

·       The term ‘organisations’ is used in these documents to cover any size of business employing GDAs – they could be Sole Traders or much larger companies. The Service needs to be provided to the same standard, whichever company is delivering it. 

DECC is inviting comment on these draft documents by close of play on Monday5 December 2011, to be sent to: green.deal@decc.gsi.gov.uk. Emails sent to this address should contain the subject heading ‘RE: Green Deal Advisor certification documents’. A suggested template for structuring responses is attached, although comments are welcome in any format. You are requested to keep your comments as concise as possible. If you know of anyone else who may be interested in commenting, please feel free to forward this message on.

DECC will review all comments received and prepare final versions of the specifications by the end of January 2012.

Many thanks



DOCUMENTS

• A specification for the provision of Green Deal Advisor Services
• Guidelines for Certification Bodies who will certify against the specification.
• Response template

There is now a little less than two months until the Green Deal consultation is due to be launched. That's not a lot of time. As someone with some experience of the inner workings of Government Departments, I can only presume that the writing of the consultation document must be well advanced if it is to have time to clear through DECC ministers and other departments before it's published. This means that DECC must be pretty sure of where it's going with the policy. Maybe this should be reassuring, but it is not. I meet with experts every day who remain unsure of what the Government is going to propose in all sorts of areas of the scheme. While this could just be a communications issue, it suggests to me that the policy is still being written in relative isolation and secrecy, away from the eyes of those with the knowlede and practical experience (and the hard-nosed commerical interest) to make it work.

The fact that apparently the consultation is being written alongside the production of the draft regulations, further strengthens the impression that (as is ususally the case with such things) the details of the scheme are already relatively fixed in the minds of ministers and officials, and there is little that 'negative' responses to the proposals will do to change them.

Now I am an optimist. I think that the Green Deal, if properly designed with genuine and open consultation, can be a success (even if it will never be the panacea that Government - Greg Barker in particular - would have us believe). I, like all of my peers, also desperately want the scheme to succeed. Reducing the emissions from our old and leaky homes here in the UK is absolutely essential if we are to reduce carbon emissions, fight rising energy costs and fuel poverty, and improve the UK's fuel security. But unless DECC considers opening up its doors a little wider, and - dare I say it - pushing back the start date for the scheme to allow for more meaningful dialogue with the industry and other experts, I can't help but think the GD may be doomed to achieve little.