

Ministers rightly wring their hands over the 2,200 jobs being lost at the 98-year-old Redcar steelworks hit by low-cost Chinese competition. But they seem deaf to warnings of 27,000 jobs being potentially lost in a brand-new industry now facing crisis due to their own clumsy cuts.

Almost 1,000 redundancies have already been made by the solar panel installers Mark Group and Climate Energy. No one in the industry believes this will be the end of the sad story.

The latest flashpoint for “green” developers is the government plan to slash the feed-in tariff – which subsidises people installing solar panels on their home – by almost 90%. Meanwhile, an energy-efficiency regime has been scrapped with only a vague promise of a future replacement.

If these were isolated examples, then companies might be willing to hang on in the hope of better things to come. But they are the latest in a series of cuts not just to solar but also to onshore wind, and come at a time when it seems maximum effort is being expended on removing roadblocks to shale-gas fracking and nuclear power.

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And yet new figures out this week from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show the cost of building nuclear or gas-fired power stations is rising – as wind and solar costs fall.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) says it is exactly those falls in the cost of renewable technology that make it unnecessary for the hard-pressed consumer to continue to fund a high level of subsidies.

Certainly, there is a need for subsidies to be constantly reviewed and possibly adjusted – but not hit with a blunt axe. And while many people might think it is well-heeled homeowners who benefit from the feed-in tariff on their solar panelled-roofs, Alex Lockton, general manager of the installer TH White, will remind them that schools and community groups will suffer too.

“We have been engaged in community solar ventures, which have been a massive success story. But they are about to get blown out of the water if the government proceeds with its latest plans to cut subsidies by 87%,” Lockton said.

Most people – Lockton included – presume that the cuts agenda is being driven by George Osborne as he tries to meet Treasury austerity objectives as much as any serious attempt by the Decc to push forward energy policy.

“We are the builders,” Osborne claimed at the Tory party conference this week. But government cuts and tinkering have already destroyed a precious commodity in the world of renewables, as in any sector of commerce – and that is confidence.

