Jessica Aldred and Press Association guardian.co.uk, Wednesday April 2 2008 About this articleClose This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday April 02 2008. It was last updated at 12:59 on April 02 2008.Fighting climate change will require a "national effort" involving business, government, and individuals, the prime minister said today as he launched a series of initiatives to help householders "green" their homes.

Gordon Brown and the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, joined an Energy Savings Trust energy doctor at a household in west London to look at energy efficiency, water use and waste reduction measures. The new scheme includes the launch of an "Act On CO2 advice line" which will give callers across the country information on how to use less energy in their homes, save water, reduce waste, adopt greener travel methods and get information about grants and offers from energy companies.

The government said it would provide £100m for the Energy Saving Trust to deliver a broader programme for green homes, which will see the roll-out of a network of one-stop advice centres around the country over the next 12 months.

The package of measures also includes a "green makeover" for up to 100 communities in England to cut their carbon footprints. The green neighbourhoods initiative will encourage communities to focus on homes with carbon footprints which are hard to reduce, such as Victorian terraces and tower blocks.

The scheme, backed by up to £10m from the government's environmental transformation fund, will also target properties which use gas or oil for heating and action outside the homes including efficient street lighting and community energy projects. And the new Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (Cert), which requires energy suppliers to make consumers' homes more energy efficient, will see investment of around £1bn a year for three years - although costs are passed onto consumers through higher energy bills.

It will involve the distribution of around 100m free or subsidised low-energy light bulbs, improved insulation for 5m households and 2-3m will receive help with measures to save energy. Around two-fifths of the work to reduce emissions and energy bills will be targeted at the over-70s and those on low incomes, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said.

The measures were announced as the Department for Communities and Local Government select committee said the government was neglecting the existing housing stock in its drive to make new homes more environmentally friendly. Answering concerns that the measures were not enough to tackle climate change, the prime minister said it was part of a series of successes which included meeting the commitments of the Kyoto treaty and running programmes for microgeneration and insulation that were so popular they were oversubscribed.

"Britain is in the lead and will continue to be in the lead but it depends on a partnership between the government, companies and individuals working together," he said. Mr Benn said the new phone line was about making it easier for people to take steps to green their homes, while the green neighbourhoods initiative was attempting to build on the growing interest in environmental matters to show what it was possible to achieve.

"It's about making it easier and supporting people to take that step. With energy prices there's never been a better time to take these steps," he said. He insisted that the new scheme was more than just piecemeal and said the obligation on suppliers to make consumers' home more energy efficient was a very large insulation programme.

He said the government was also looking at feeding tariffs, which guarantee a long-term price to homeowners who sell electricity from small scale renewables back to the grid, which would encourage investment in microgeneration. "We've got to make progress with the housing stock. It does depend on individual households but I think it's about each of us doing our bit, in the end it's got to be a partnership."

And he said with carbon budgets arising in the next budget for the whole nation, "we've all got a lot more to do," he acknowledged. The shadow environment secretary, Peter Ainsworth, accused the government of rehashing the launch of the service, which was first announced last November. "People will be more inclined to take advice if the government had not had to bring in its own energy doctor as 15 government departments are now less energy-efficient than they were nine years ago," he added.

The Lib Dems' environment spokesman, Steve Webb, said: "It's all very well setting up helplines to give people advice, but improving home insulation is expensive and the financial support being offered is woefully inadequate. "Once again, the size of the government solution is dwarfed by the scale of the problem. "We are not going to make any progress in the fight against climate change if we have to rely on piecemeal initiatives from a department that has no money and no power."

The campaign group Friends of the Earth said that while it supported the Act on CO2 initiative, the scheme was "chronically underfunded", and not a substitute for a comprehensive programme to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the housing sector.

"The government must make major carbon dioxide cuts from the housing sector, which accounts for a quarter of UK emissions, if it has any hope of meeting its climate change targets. The new advice service launched today is a good initiative, but it can't gloss over the failure of the government's unambitious and underfunded policies aimed at greening our homes," said Friends of the Earth's low-carbon homes campaigner, Dave Timms.

"A national mobilisation of resources is needed to make all our homes warm, green and cheap to run. The government must end fuel poverty, massively increase the grants and tax breaks available to help homes save energy, and revolutionise its approach to small scale renewable energy systems."

(The Guardian, 02/04/2008)