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UtILIty WEEK | 9th - 15th May 2014 | 9 Interview M ark Bayley insists he has something to be proud of. While the Green Deal's struggles have been well-aired, less frequently told is the story of the Green Deal Finance Company (GDFC), a national institu- tion that is able to provide competitive finance to more than 80 per cent of the population to enable them to improve the quality of their homes. Bayley is the chief executive of the GDFC. He has a string of explanations for why the Green Deal has started slowly, and confi- dently predicts that the energy revolution is just around the corner. Of the £244 million of government funding behind GDFC, more than £9 million has been loaned out, with 2,400 plans currently being processed. There are 50 providers able to offer the loans, with a further 18 set to open their Green Deal doors. It is a rare success story in the short but chequered history of the Green Deal. The sign-up rate (only 2,000 plans have been agreed since the government's flagship energy efficiency scheme was officially launched in January 2013) tells of a lack of awareness of the initiative, which has been hamstrung by its flaws. This apathy towards the scheme, over the difficult months since it emerged blinking and bleary eyed, has led to numerous calls for the Green Deal to be overhauled or scrapped completely. Bayley is used to facing harsh criticism. Before the Green Deal, he was the head of the company that deliv- ered High Speed One, and then was a driving force behind the controversial High Speed Two project. Goodbye frying pan, hello fire. But he does at least feel at home in a new office, located just off platform one of London's Paddington railway station. More importantly, his experience of cre- ating, and in the case of HS2 promoting, a nationally sig- nificant infrastructure project has le Bayley prepared for everything the Green Deal has to throw at him. "My job was to get the thing up and running," he says of the GDFC. "I've got it financed, I've got it operational, and I know we've got to endure for a lot longer than we first thought because demand never plays out like people first think it will. "I just instinctively knew that when I joined the com- pany, but the job was just to get it going to service what demand there was out there." Pointing out of his office window to one of the Cross- rail construction sites, he once again draws the infra- structure parallel. "If you analyse all the issues around the Green Deal, you will find that they are typical infra- structure issues. "Anyone who knows about delivering these large, complex national infrastructure projects knows they take a long time to get going and get practised at it." For Bayley, while the GDFC has not been faultless, it is merely a vehicle to provide finance. He says a significant share of the blame for the lack of take-up must lie with the big six and the government. Energy efficiency is already a "no-brainer", but Bay- ley says more needs to done to get people to insulate themselves from the predicted price increases, because so far the Green Deal has not managed this. How? Well, with more than one year gone, and the