Where Britain’s journey to insulation went wrong
Christmas 2015 was a miserable one for the 1,000 employees of Leicester-based Mark Group who had lost their jobs with the energy efficiency company just weeks before.
The business, named Britain’s fastest-growing in a prestigious list published just two years earlier, had become a casualty of then prime minister David Cameron’s environmental flip-flopping, which saw him oscillate from hugging a husky to issuing a pledge to “cut the green crap”.
A wave of state-funded schemes helping homeowners to patch up draughty homes had been replaced in 2013 with the deeply flawed green deal, which waseventually killed off in summer 2015.
Companies in the sector shrank or folded in the face of a sudden dearth of customers able to afford improvements. The annual number of installations of cavity wall and loft insulations has fallen from more than 2m to barely a tenth of that today.
“Helping people [laid-off employees] carry personal belongings to their cars brings it home to you,” says Mark Group’s chief commercial officer Bill Rumble. “You’re not sure what to say when they close the boot.”
It’s not rocket science,” says David Adams, of the UK Green Building Council, who witnessed the insulation industry’s rapid decay.
“If the market reduces by three-quarters, you have to take three-quarters of your capacity out. Some will close and to a significant extent they have not rehired because activity has remained low since.”
Boris Johnson has fared little better than Cameron. His Green Homes Grant for England was introduced in summer 2020 only to be axed six months later. It was branded a “slam dunk fail”.
Meanwhile, upgrades made under the Energy Companies Obligation system have risen and fallen as short-term schemes ended, never fuelling a
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