Have you been cold called by a ‘Green Deal’ scam?

malcolm r, What you’ve said is basically good common sense. Ellie Simmonds says “It’s no wonder a scheme that helps you buy a new boiler or insulation for your home should be popular” well Ellie it’s actually not very popular. Green Deal take up has been a fraction of that envisaged by those who thought up the scheme, basically because it’s not a good scheme at all.

As a domestic energy assessor who has been looking closely at this scheme since it started I’ve concluded it’s a terrible scheme. I decided not to qualify as a Green deal assessor. I decided not to have anything to do with it.

An upfront Green Deal assessment costing about £100 often to tell you something you clearly already know, you’re supplier options are restricted to those who are Green Deal approved and who will charge much higher prices. A loan attached to the property paid back with a levy on your electricity bill and which will include something like 7% interest. Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me. Would you be keen on buying a property where you have to carry on paying for a boiler someone else had installed?

It can get even worse, if you are a tenant you’ll be paying to upgrade your Landlords property and you’ll save nothing or very little on your energy bills, but the landlord gets a free boiler installed in his property.

If you are on low income there is ECO “Energy Company Obligation” where upgrades can be installed free, nothing wrong with that, although I still think in the case of a rented property the landlord should be also obliged to contribute rather than everyone paying an energy bill.

For most of us though my advice is have nothing to do with the Green Deal, arrange your own finance, use a much cheaper local gas safe plumber for that new boiler and save yourself a small fortune.

Ellie talks about the danger of “Green Deal scammers”.???
I’m sure there are some but It’s the Green Deal that is the biggest scam Ellie.
Do a bit more research and consider alternative ways to get yourself upgraded and come back to us.

I must admit that when I read in the Intro that half a million homes had been assessed but that only 13,000 had entered into a Green Deal finance scheme I thought it showed the deal was not all it’s cracked up to be. Even allowing for the fact that many of the homes assessed might have been judged ineligible, and that many householders might have had the assessment but made their own financial arrangements as Malcolm recommends, that’s a pretty poor testimony for a potentially valuable way of improving energy efficiency and conservation in this country. Chris mentions the implications of selling a house which has outstanding financial commitments under the Green Deal and I think that is a worrying factor for many people that puts them off.

@malcolm r, Excellent post. Well said.

Hi Jonah,
Did you ever get any success with to attemp to get the £299 back from Tivium?
Regards,
John

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One of the joys of having an answer machine on your phone I do not have an answer machine and do not answer calls from unknown numbers so do not appear get unwanted calls .Sometimes I wish I did (not really though )

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Despite searching thoroughly I have never found any links between the UK Telephone Preference Service and any American organisation, other than perhaps sharing a name – which many transatlantic organisations do. It is not really a “quango”, just a trade body funded by the direct marketing industry with authority from Ofcom but no powers of enforcement [which lie with the Information Commissioner’s Office]. The ICO can, of course, act on reports of non compliance from the TPS, the DMA, or anyone else. Companies that operate legitimately would have a vested interest in shutting down offenders against the direct marketing rules so I cannot understand any suggestion that the DMA would want to go soft on contraventions; that really would be self-inflicted harm. “Telemarketers” is just a collective noun for companies or people who engage in direct marketing by telephone and similar technology. Like most organisations that rely on gathering personal data, the TPS is an attractive target for leakers and hackers and it is not outside the bounds of possibility that the names and numbers of people on the TPS register have been captured and sold to companies who have less respect for the law. I believe some time ago a Which? investigation found that people registered with TPS were more likely to receive nuisance calls than others. It seems that things might have improved over the last year or two as there have been far fewer complaints on this site than previously.

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Having done a quick search it’s curious and tantalisingly oblique. It would seem that the DMA – now the Data Marketing Association – is based in Canada and has merged with the Association of National Advertisers, an organisation currently preventing EU citizens from access. Fire up the VPN and we see that the ANA is US-based, and that means both the DMA and ANA are now essentially the same corporate structure and based in N America.

If we follow that to its logical conclusion, then since the TPS is funded by the DMA it seems Duncan’s concerns might be rooted in reality.

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It’s far from a clear picture, however. DMA and DMA UK are apparently different entities, but DMA Global, which appears to be under the purview of DMA UK, further muddies the waters.

It’s so muddled you could be forgiven for thinking they’re trying to hide something.

I agree that the picture is not only oblique but also both opaque and obscure – deliberately so in my opinion; this is not especially surprising for the over-arching representative of the notoriously shifty marketing industry. There are apparently 27 DMA’s around the globe and they have formed Global DMA to act collectively for the national DMA’s. Whether the UK DMA is a stand-alone organisation operating only in the UK and governed entirely and exclusively by its own board and trustees is far from clear – but I have found no evidence otherwise.

I could find no reference to the UK DMA having changed its name to the Data Marketing Association, but on the other hand the DMA is so coy about its identity that in no place does it reveal the words behind the initials. It appears to be run by a trust and is funded by the ‘marketing industry’ which is a convenient catch-all for a wide range of practitioners in persuading people to part with money for things by direct marketing – personal contact in other words. As part of the government’s pact with the . . . ; no, as part of its understanding and agreement with the industry to keep the long arm and heavy hand of the law away from the gentle flesh of the marketers, the government has authorised the DMA to apply a degree of self-regulation in the form of preference services for (a) contact by mail and (b) contact by telephone, for both of which people have to register. This takes a workload off the ICO and Ofcom but I would bet it all works in the industry’s favour overall. Sure, there have been cases where companies have been fined for breaches of the law but not as many as would be expected from the number of consumer complaints in past years. As I said previously, the problem seems to have abated lately, probably because the PPI compensation opportunity is reaching the end of the road. I think it is arguable that self-regulation has generally been quite effective and that the industry is reasonably clean. So why does it need to hide behind a veil?

It occurs to me that the DMA that has merged with the Association of National Advertisers [an American trade organisation for the advertising industry] is the Canadian DMA only and does not incorporate the UK DMA or the other national DMA’s. Nevertheless there are several affinities at various levels that all conspire to make the diffuse image hard to resolve. Whether this all makes a scrap of difference to how the TPS operates and how UK consumers can stop unwanted and nuisance calls is doubtful. Whether a government-run scheme would be any better is also doubtful to my mind, especially if it were outsourced to certain companies who dabble in all sorts of public services from a base point of little experience. Legitimate marketing organisations have a direct interest in knocking out the rogues yet it seems to me that the industry has pulled its punches and not been as forceful as it should have been. I wonder if Which? is a member of the DMA . . .

What a beautiful phrase:

this is not especially surprising for the over-arching representative of the notoriously shifty marketing industry..