Zero-carbon homes attract tax relief in the UK shout the headlines. Great. But hold on a minute we don’t have any zero-carbon homes yet – and are some way of achieving them according to most people in the know. So what’s it all about? Sadly, it appears to be yet more government spin or hijacking of the ‘green agenda’ for political point scoring.

The latest piece of whimsy is packaged up as a tax relief on stamp duty for buyers of new zero-carbon homes. The new rules stipulate that homebuyers can save up to £15,000 in tax relief, although even if they qualified most people would not save anything like that amount. Purchasers of resale zero-carbon homes will not qualify for the tax relief.

So, what have we got then? Well, we have no zero-carbon homes – so no one could qualify – and even more staggeringly we do not yet have a government definition of what a zero-carbon home is. I know, it’s truly bewildering isn’t it? Here we are being bombarded by the government with zero-carbon this and carbon-neutral that, and housebuilders are being given targets to achieve by 2016, but against what?

Currently, the Treasury has said: “[a] zero-carbon home is one that does not consume fossil fuels for heat and power. It is highly insulated and uses renewable energy to power its needs over a year through micro-generation.

“Heat and power technologies include ground source heat pumps, photovoltaic cells, solar water heaters and wind turbines. It will draw from the grid when the microgeneration [e.g. solar panels] is insufficient but could sell excess generation back to the grid.”

Er, that’s it. No measureables, no hard facts, no performance targets. Of course there are building regulations and legislation, many of which pertain to energy efficiency, but really you would have thought that the government could do better than that, wouldn’t you? The Treasury has promised a ‘more detailed’ definition by the end of November. Don’t hold your breath.