Quick! I hope you’ve made it in to the office early this morning to help cope with all the leads that will surely come in now that the Green Deal has now been launched. Oh wait, that’s right, you’ve come in too early for nothing!

Yes today is the ‘soft launch’ of the Green Deal. After years of planning, problems, disputed government research, meetings and discussions, the flagship Government scheme is now starting to roll out in a very leisurely pace. What the soft launch of the Green Deal basically means is that all the paper preparation work can be done. That means meetings/leads can be organised to have work done under the Green Deal, but no actual work can be done until after 28th January 2013 at the very earliest. I personally think it won’t be until after Spring. The reason? There isn’t actually any funding available from the Green Deal bank! The bank which is funding the whole thing. There’s not a penny in the kitty yet!

One HUGE mistake the Government has made in this whole thing is the lack of advertising. Even if only the paper work side of the scheme was available to complete, there should have been a lot of TV, newspaper and advertising boards adverts to help boost the public’s knowledge of the scheme and get some genuine interest going. Up to press, I have had only one person ask me about the Green Deal, and that was only because he works for the council. If the Government expects the scheme to do well, they really have to start making the public aware.

The problem is, if it is left for the industry to make the buying public aware, it’s not going to work. The reputation of the industry means that anything we say is going to be held back and our word not be trusted. It will look just like another industry made scheme that doesn’t look credible. It needs the Government to hit the mainstream media hard with clear, simple advertisements to explain to potential consumers what the Green Deal is and how they go about starting the process off.

Question is though, how many of you are actually going to actively promote the Green Deal and explain the scheme to your potential customers? Please let me know how many of you gets leads in for the scheme and if any of them turn into sales!

Also, as this post has been written before the 1st October, I will be posting the results of the poll I have been running since a couple of months ago later on in the day. This means the tab at the bottom of the page will go and the results will be on this post permanently.