Understanding the effectiveness of the Green Deal and the Energy Company Obligation; a study of policy impact on the retrofit supply chain

Within the UK retrofit policy landscape, government involvement in financing, managing and implementing policy has been scaled back. This process has resulted in a private industry lead policy mechanism, the Green Deal (GD). In relying on private actors to produce energy efficient retrofit at scale under the GD, policymakers are anticipating high levels of innovation, inter-business collaboration, customer service and investment. Since the GD’s commencement in early 2013 however, substantial levels of activity have yet to materialise. Understanding why there is a mismatch between policy expectancy and the level of actual activity is the focus of this paper. Differing types of impact generated by the GD upon the supply chain are investigated, and the rate at which barriers to growth are being removed is examined.
To capture the interactions between this new policy landscape and the supply chain, interviews with key commercial stakeholders, running businesses regularly interacting with policy are utilised. These businesses provide retrofit measures under the title of GD assessor or installer, and function in the main, to profit from implementing the policy aims, at ground level. Focussing on the assessment of policy performance, the exact impacts of differing mechanisms upon businesses can be determined. Through this pinpointing of influential factors affecting the performance of policy, findings aid the understanding of what barriers are hindering businesses presently, and to what extent they could be reduced into the future. These results contribute to ongoing policy learning from ground level sources, with insight into the effectiveness of policy upon the financial, operational and growth characteristics of businesses.