I have never made any secret of the fact that I see the Green Deal as potentially very good for the energy assessment industry, and potentially very good for the country, so I\u2019m keen to see it work, which no doubt colours my attitude to other press coverage of it.<\/p>\n
But am I really the only person who thinks that some very odd stuff has gone on over press coverage of the scheme?<\/p>\n
Take the gem below which appeared today on the Guardian website:<\/p>\n
\nFour out of five people have not heard of green deal, poll finds<\/em><\/h3>\n
UK government’s flagship energy efficiency programme remains largely unknown just days before its launch<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Admittedly the Guardian \u2013 for reasons which are genuinely hard to fathom in a title with generally pretty \u2018brown rice\u2019 views \u2013 has been virulently anti-Green Deal right from the start, and featured prominently in the article I did on Green Deal and the press back in October<\/a>. But even so you would hope for a bit of common sense, wouldn\u2019t you? I mean, as their second deck of headline points out, the scheme has not launched yet! Why should you expect people to have heard of a scheme that hasn\u2019t launched yet?<\/p>\n
This sort of thing has been going on for months, and I simply can\u2019t imagine a comparable situation in the private sector. If a big commercial company was planning to launch a new product, would any newspaper be running \u2018shock-horror\u2019 headlines before the launch claiming that no-one had heard of the product? Of course not! The company would be saying, \u2018Of course not, we haven\u2019t launched it yet!\u2019 There would be hundreds of \u2018Doh!\u2019 posts on forums. The paper would be a laughing stock!<\/p>\n
The Coalition has got to shoulder some of the responsibility for this. I said at the time that it was a major error not to make some announcement on the original launch date of 1 October. They only needed to reiterate that the launch had been postponed some months before, and re-state the timetable, and what might reasonably be expected in terms of early take-up. Instead there was total silence from DECC. Big mistake!<\/p>\n
It gave the Opposition the opportunity to have lots of fun, claiming the scheme was a failure long before anyone could actually get a Green Deal plan. We of course know that this is all nonsense and just politicking \u2013 but the public don\u2019t.<\/p>\n