Report reveals slow start for Obama's green home vision

Barack Obama's $5bn (£3.2bn) retrofitting scheme to improve the energy efficiency of more than half a million homes fell 98 per cent short of its target last year, according to an official report released last week.

The green home makeover programme, part of last year's $787bn economic recovery plan, was supposed to create about 87,000 jobs insulating lofts and sealing drafty windows in 593,000 homes by 2012.

But progress so far has been painfully slow, according to the report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that by the end of last year only 9,100 homes had been "weatherised".

It added that to date $522m has been spent, which works out to about $57,000 for each of the 9,100 homes.

The GAO report said that government red tape was at the root of the slow progress.

For example, the report said that the Department of Labor spent much of last year trying to determine the prevailing wage for weatherisation work, a determination that had to be made separately for more than 3,000 counties in the US.

Meanwhile, many homes have to be put through a National Historic Preservation Trust review before upgrade work can begin.

The Department of Energy, which administers the scheme, said the report was based on old data, arguing that the rollout of the initiative was accelerating and more than 120,000 homes had been retrofitted since the report was put together.

"By the end of 2009, our programmes had weatherised about 124,000 homes in total, and we are on track to weatherise more than 250,000 this year," the department said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.