FITs to be downgraded?

Uh oh! No sooner do I sing the praises of FITs than there is an article in the FT suggesting that there are moves afoot to review the tariff levels well before the published 2013 date. This has the potential to be another stop-go fiasco (rather like the problems the CWI industry has been experiencing with EEC/CERT). If the government really does want to see "up to 250,000 green jobs" being created - as stated by Chris Huhne at the Lib Deb conference - then they absolutely must provide some stability and certainty. Perhaps there is an argument that FITs are a tad generous, with payback potentially of the order of 10 years, but there has to be some allowance for Joe Public's psychology. Most people seem to have a relatively high discount rate in the back of their minds when making major investment decisions such as installing PV (I bet most don't actually do a DCF calculation!) and there is a political decision to be made as to whether to allow for this, make the rewards slightly generous, and achieve extensive uptake of renewable technologies or to be purist and them bemoan slow penetration. It's a case of "watch this space" but HMG could well be shooting themselves in the foot with this one.