With the demise of the Green Deal at the beginning of this Government’s reign, it was widely predicted that the scrapping of ECO and Green Deal will be the cause of thousands of job losses and the closure of hundreds of companies. Well, it now seems that the walls have unfortunately started to crumble and we’re seeing some high profile companies suffer.

Mark Group

The one which most of you may have heard of is Mark Group. They install energy efficient products such as insulation and solar panels. In fact it was the Mark Group that put cavity wall insulation in my parent’s home a year or two ago.

Unfortunately it was announced that the company was being placed in administration by Deloitte and that they were rushing to try and find a buyer for the business.

However it looks bleak. The company employs just under 1000 staff. But this is a business which is operating in a sector that the Government has laid waste to in recent months. They have scrapped the Green Deal, ECO, their sustainable homes targets and much more. The money paid for the solar feed-in-tariff is almost non-existent now.

It is very hard for companies operating in energy saving sector to simply survive right now. And the Mark Group have not been the only recent casualties.

Climate Energy

Admittedly I had not heard of this company until I learned that they were going out of business. Like many other companies suffering, they were a Green Deal provider, like many window installation companies no doubt.

The company turned over nearly £47m of business in 2014 and employed 128 people, so clearly a decent sized business. However, the baron climate in which they were operating proved too harsh and they too have had to call in the administrators.

More to come

It sad, but the company closures due to mass moth-balling of energy policies like Green Deal and ECO will continue. A quick search on Twitter with the #GreenDeal tag revealed quite a lot of negative tweets about companies that had gone bust, companies that had cancelled very large contracts, job losses and the expectation of more companies soon to be no more.

This is the ultimate stab in the back for many from Green Deal. This was a scheme that was never going to work, and was always going to be scrapped once the political environment changed. Companies who positively filed in one by one hoping to make the most of an expected jump in business created by Green Deal were left very underwhelmed.

They were then left angry as the scheme was such a flop that the new Government decided it had go. Which meant in such a short space of time, all the businesses that had been formed around the scheme were going to disappear quickly.

I have read various articles saying that the Government has tasked an expert to find alternatives to replace Green Deal. I sincerely hope that if the window industry is to even want to be part of yet another scheme, that this time it is far better planned, constructed and promoted than the last one!

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