In my days I have been a willing sheep (no Welsh jokes please) to numerous bandwagons/topical issues, etc. In fashion you will have found me wearing my ‘Frankie Says Relax’ t-shirt in the 1980s followed by a general moping around in the early 1990s with my baggy jeans and a relaxed fringe. Nowadays I am forced to join the ‘wear a suit to work’ bandwagon which seems to have been running for the best part of 200 years.
I haven’t just conformed in terms of the clothes I wear. At various times I have campaigned on issues as important as, ‘Keep Music Live’, ‘Ban the Bomb’, ‘and ‘Free the Coronation Street one’, to name but a few. My support of the campaign to rid British television screens of Barry Scott, the man who advertises Cillit Bang, has been universally acclaimed and I am soon to join those lobbying for the removal of Chris Moyles from not just this country, but the entire Earth. Our cause is just - bring back Mark Goodybags and David ‘Kid’ Pension.
But I digress. I am here to jump on a bandwagon which has grown to enormous proportions. In fact, I’m not sure it is a bandwagon anymore - unless you’re a politician. The issue is of course being ‘green’ and what it actually means to be ‘green’. In days gone by, being ‘green’ meant you were wet behind the ears, lacking experience, in effect a ‘young fool’. Following this being labelled ‘green’ was a dismissive term, reserved for those who wore tofu sandals and hugged trees for a living.
Now, of course being ‘green’ is the lifestyle we should all be living – ‘green’ permeates all our lives in terms of the choices we make, the products we buy and the various gasses we emit. We are all urged to do our bit – insulate our homes properly, take our TVs off standby and recycle, recycle, recycle. We are said to be at a crossroads, these are the end times if we choose to keep on living as we do and therefore a change has got to come. The question is whether David ‘Dave’ Cameron and Gordon Brown are the men to bring this change? We shall see.
The point is that no-one should feel they are immune. All sectors of society, all products, all businesses are being asked to do their bit. And the mortgage and housing market is no exception. Home Information Packs (HIPs) are almost with us – 1 June 2007 - and the messages behind their introduction and benefits are decidedly ‘green’. The Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) has been promoted up the list of pack documents and is now the first part of the pack anyone will see. Estate agents have also been urged to include the EPC with the property’s particulars. The aim is to promote the energy efficiency of the home and where the certificate reveals the home is not as energy efficient as it could be, for the seller to do something about it, or for the potential buyer to take that into account when they weigh up making an offer.
The EPC is likely to increase in importance as time moves on. The government is already looking at options to link the EPC to incentives for home owners. It wants to encourage energy efficiency and it could do this with, for instance, council tax rebates which some local authorities are offering. The government are clearly encouraging people to go ‘green’ in the short-term to pick up the long-term benefits.
Lenders are also being urged to ‘go green’ in terms of the products they provide. The government is keen to see products which ‘give homebuyers money to meet the cost of making energy saving improvements’ – a sort of ‘green cashback’ if you will. That said, the true definition of a ‘green mortgage’ has yet to be fully worked out and therefore we have different products, some offering a discount on the SVR if the property is suitably energy efficient, while other lenders plant trees to offset the mortgage’s carbon footprint. A number of lenders offer ‘green mortgages’ including the Ecology Building Society, Norwich & Peterborough BS and Teachers Building Society.
The existence of these ‘green mortgages’ is commendable and it would be pleasing to see more products introduced in this area. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a considerable amount of demand from consumers at the moment for these type of products. That said, with the introduction of HIPs, the focus on the EPC and our politicians fighting over who is more ‘green’, this is likely to translate into some serious thought on ‘green mortgages’ from a number of lenders. Who knows, they may even believe there is some serious money to be made in going green. Then we would see the bandwagon numbers grow.
