Who's really going green?

Despite all the hot air being emitted by the Government and the house builders, there is still a dearth of new environmentally-sensitive housing in London.

In February, the building industry grandly launched the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), to promote green homes in the UK. A month later, Gordon Brown trumpeted the birth of eco-villages, and declared that all new homes would be carbon neutral by 2016.

Yet there are still only a handful of developers building green homes. A spokesman for the UKGBC says: "There aren't that many 'deep green' new homes being built in volume yet. There are a few small-scale projects, but no big ones."

While many developers are keen to flag up gimmicky add-ons such as bird boxes or low flush loos, most new homes are still struggling to meet minimum energy efficiency standards. Green architect Bill Dunster blames the poor standards of new homes on the building industry's need to make vast profits to pay for the land they have bought.

Andrew Warren, director of the Association for the Conservation of Energy, says that not only are minimum standards too low, but that the Government is refusing to let local authorities insist on higher standards because of their drive to build huge quantities of new homes.

"You either get cheap, quick and dirty, or you go slower and get it right. At the moment the need for volume is taking precedence over energy efficiency."

In solar power, too, we are lagging way behind our European counterparts. In many European countries, people who generate their own electricity via solar panels and feed it back into the national grid are remunerated at four times the market rate.

In Britain micro-generators only get the standard rate, meaning that the payback time for installing panels is about 25-30 years here compared with less than 10 in countries such as Germany.

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