British households, arise! The time has come to "cut your bills and make your home energy efficient at no upfront cost". You can save the planet, and your hard-earned cash at the same time.
As the media reports on rising energy bills, this offer of energy efficiency improvements from British Gas seems like a good one - gain access to energy efficiency technologies from insulation to smart metering, and reduce your energy usage and bills accordingly.

The opportunity is being presented to households as "a forerunner" to the government's much-vaunted "green deal", the scheme to encourage people to waste less energy by allowing them to install efficiency measures for little or no cash upfront, repaying the cost instead by instalments on energy bills in the future. The "green deal" is scheduled to come into effect from late next year.
So the first of such enterprises must surely be an occasion to celebrate. As the Centre for Economics and Business Research showed in recent research, people who adopted a range of simple measures saved on average £322 each year, and saw a 44% fall in their gas use between 2006 and 2010.

The funny thing is, though, that in publicising its offer to cut people's energy bills, British Gas entirely fails to note that it has been to blame for raising those bills in the first place.

Earlier this month, British Gas and its parent company, Centrica, announced a price hike of 18% for gas customers and 16% for households buying its electricity.

On Monday, without a single reference to these increases, the company told people they could access home improvements and pay the extra cost through increases in their....More on this Story: British Gas: cost-saving claims add up to barefaced cheek | Fiona Harvey | Environment | guardian.co.uk