>

Recently we have seen campaigns by Everest and Anglian Home Improvements advertising their own scrappage schemes. From their point of view, the campaign to get the government to introduce a scrappage scheme design to benefit the double glazing industry provided the perfect advertising gimmick, and no doubt it may have swung a few customer’s their way by now. But their campaigns in my opinion are mis-guided and have been a waste of energy. With the size of the companies involved with this type of campaign, I would have thought it more beneficial to have all the employees of both companies sign the government petition to introduce such a scheme nationwide. At the moment, the number of signatures on that petition stands at just over 3700. How many more could there be if there was a concerted effort by both Anglian and Everest to get as many new names on there as possible?

My second thought is that the campaign is not so believable. Because there seems to be just these two involved, when customers start to shop around for prices they will come to realise that no one else is advertising a scrappage scheme, and realise it is just another advertising gimmick, feeding off the success of the car and new boiler versions. To me this puts the validity of the campaign in doubt. It won’t have the effect on customers that it wants to achieve because it’s not a government scheme. This is why energies would have been better placed in putting thousands of signatures on the government petition website.

We risk the petition falling through and not being noticed because of this. While Anglian and Everest were thoughtless and only saw a ‘quick buck’ benefit for themselves, they have put the success of the petition at risk. Personally, I now think that we won’t have such a scheme introduced because the heavy-weight influence of the national companies hasn’t been put to good use, and has instead been used to feed greed, much like the bankers in fact!

So, if there are any readers who work for a national company, why haven’t you instructed your employees to help the industry they work in and sign the petition for a national windows scrappage scheme?