£1 billion bank is nothing new

So, yesterday we heard the Chancellor put £1 billion of our money into a green investment bank.

But did you know we already spend much more than this? The Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) creates an obligation for energy companies to spend money every year to encourage us to buy less energy from them. The cost of this program (paid for by each of us, with small increases in our energy bills) is about £1.3 bn every year. It's mostly spent on subsidising loft and cavity wall insulation and a few hundred million low energy light bulbs.

Unfortunately this very expensive program isn't working: we'll do a post to explain why that's the case later on. I don't know why nobody writes about this in the press.