Saturday 25 July 2009

Two Stories That Were Missed

Having been busy for the last two weeks with my friend's 're-decs', I missed two stories of interest which, courtesy of Geoffrey Lean writing in the Daily Telegraph, I am now able to comment upon.

The first concerns the 'free', supposedly, energy saving light bulbs we all get sent by the gas and electricity companies. The paper reports that hundreds of millions of the damn things have been sent - often unable to fit standard British bayonet sockets. Besides experts suspecting that the majority of these bulbs are never used, chucked out or stored, what is even more 'wasteful' is that Ofgem, the regulator that is supposed to be monitoring the scheme, cannot provide present-day information until 2012!

Also included in the scheme that Ofgem are supposed to be monitoring is advice which should help households, particularly low-income, vulnerable or elderly ones, save energy and money though such measures as insulating walls and lofts. But now it transpires that a survey by the Energy Savings Trust (another NGO like Ofgem) has found that 62 per cent of people who inquired about energy-saving offers were told they could not have them.

And the cost of all this? Of sending out unsolicited light bulbs that don't fit. of administering a scheme whereby more than half those inquiring, don't qualify, of an NGO that appears to not be doing its job?

The second story concerns the revelation, last week, that ministers at John Denham's Department of Communities and Local Government had scrapped an important energy-saving scheme without his knowledge. Geoffrey Lean asks whether that could be true and comments surely not as it would suggest that Denham was not in control of his department.

You mean Geoffrey, that Britain actually does have a Secretary of State that knows what he/she is doing, and that it is not all balls then?

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