Jeremy Leggett, Executive Chairman, Solarcentury said:

“Since the CSR, I’ve had numerous conversations with Ministers during which I have been assured that any urgent review of feed-in tariffs would be carried out after publication of a proper trigger and would in any case exclude built-environment PV. The Government has not only betrayed those assurances, but today proposes feed-in tariff rates that would ensure the UK PV industry stalls. In doing this they make a mockery of their own supposed core objectives: local empowerment within a Big Society, massive job creation to countervail austerity-related job losses via a green industrial revolution, desire to be the greenest government ever, and so on.”

He added:

“The total cost of the PV tariff to date has been less than a penny per month on domestic bills and the total FIT spend is running way below the Government’s projections. Meanwhile thousands of new green jobs of the type the Prime Minister has told me his Government wants to promote have been created and the Treasury’s coffers are being filled with the increased tax and NI take from what was a growing and confident sector. All of that has been debilitated at a stroke. No renewables company or investor can easily be able to trust this Government again after this u-turn by Ministers who were so quick in opposition to call for a more ambitious feed-in tariff, and so ready with empty promises in the early months of government. Moreover, they do all this at the time of both the Fukishima nuclear disaster and profound instability in the Middle East. The inevitable meltdown for the UK nuclear renaissance and the potential meltdown of affordable oil supply mean that the UK needs domestic renewable energy industries more than ever today. In setting us back so, at such a time, I believe the government is guilty of a betrayal of national security.”