Electricity and Gas (Carbon Emissions Reduction) Order 2008

I shall come to the issues the noble Lord raises separately, in a moment. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, raised the issue of boilers. They are not eligible for the CERT because efficient boilers are required under building regulations. You cannot buy an inefficient boiler today anyway. It would therefore not provide additional activity under the CERT. We are, however, promoting the early replacement of boilers through the energy performance aspect of the building directive. There is an issue with boilers and, as the noble Lord has rightly said, with inefficient ones the energy is going straight up the chimney. More and more are being replaced. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, was kind enough to give me some advance warning of the point he wished to raise. I therefore have some detailed responses. If they are not sufficient, I will follow them up. The noble Lord asked what is the point of setting targets for gas and electricity suppliers to help families in fuel poverty if they are denied information about who they are. He also asked what Defra is doing to find people in the priority group. Under the CERT, energy suppliers will be required to direct at least 40 per cent of carbon savings to a priority group of low-income and elderly consumers. They are not necessarily the same—I made that point about the over-70s—but nevertheless a large element of the low-income target group is the over-70s. The priority group is defined as those in receipt of certain income-related or disability benefits, tax credits or pension credit, as well as those aged 70 or over. Suppliers may use a variety of methods to identify that group of customers. They include setting out the priority group criteria in promotional material; partnership arrangements with bodies such as, for example, housing associations or charities that work with priority group consumers, such as Age Concern, to take one at random; and showing consumers the priority group criteria when giving out measures person to person, which they do when conducting inspection checks. More generally, we are committed to using knowledge of those who are likely to be in fuel poverty to ensure that they can get help. We are considering a number of options with the energy suppliers and fuel poverty programme managers. They include the Government writing to benefit recipients on behalf of those offering the help or providing information where there is a high propensity for people to be on benefit. Although it was said in jest, there was a serious point behind what the noble Lord said at the end of his speech. I take his point because what has happened with the recent information lapses has been nothing short of a disgrace and complete lapse in good standards in public administration. But there are serious issues about individual names, addresses and personal information. This winter, for example, we are going to support a mail shot to 250,000 pension credit recipients offering free insulation and help to install central heating. We want to look at these options before we consider fully sharing the personal data of millions of people, most of whom will not be fuel poor or eligible for assistance. We are continuing our large-scale Keep Warm Well campaign, aimed at vulnerable households in England, which gives information on the health benefits of keeping warm in winter and details of the grants and benefits available. That brings together cross-government communications that are, I hope, co-ordinated and accessible. The noble Lord was quite right when he asked the question, and gave the answer, about Warm Front savings contributing to the 40 per cent target, which is surely impossible. As he said, the figures in the note to the statutory instrument do not take that into account. In the consultation proposals on how it would administer the CERT, the regulator, Ofgem, made it clear that where a supplier undertakes action in conjunction with the government programme, there should be no double counting of carbon savings. Ofgem will shortly issue its supplier guidance on the carbon emissions reduction target, which will set out the criteria for ensuring additionality. We are obviously very keen to encourage interaction, where possible, between the CERT, Warm Front and other government programmes, so that they support the arrangements between the CERT energy suppliers and the Warm Front scheme manager as private companies to maximise the benefit to vulnerable people. The noble Lord asked what Defra expected a householder on the Warm Front scheme to do about microgeneration. Although Warm Front does not currently offer microgeneration technology as part of a portfolio of measures, it can provide, and has mechanisms for assessing, alternative technologies that could be brought into the scheme. In this light, Warm Front is undertaking a pilot exercise of solar-thermal systems, which will assess whether that technology is suitable for inclusion as a main Warm Front measure. It is also useful to note that, since the summer 2007 consultation, we have expanded the scope of the CERT priority group; the over-70s were not in the original consultation. The supply target has therefore increased by some 2.5 million households. The assumptions on which the CERT target is based recognise that the priority group consumers will receive the measures at little or no cost. That gives rise to another question, which the noble Lord did not touch on but alluded to. It is generally known that those in some of the severest fuel poverty in the country pay more for their electricity and gas than the rest of us because they are still on coin meters. There is no doubt that that is a massive attack on the marginal cost of electricity. That issue is not part of this, but it will have to be dealt with in due course because there must be fairness between one section of society and another. There is no sense in targeting low-income, fuel-poor people with all these schemes but penalising them because they are still on coin-operated meters, which is what the utilities do. That issue is not in my brief, but I offer it from my experience as a constituency Member of Parliament. It is a paradox because the Government can be accused of promoting schemes to assist those people when other measures could be taken to help them directly with the cost of electricity. The hassle factor and the upfront costs of investing even in such things as energy-saving bulbs are what put them off. There is another major issue. We currently have no proposals in legislation to allow energy suppliers to have the names and addresses of people on various benefits. That is not part of the operation. It might have been thought a good idea to do it that way around, but it is not being done that way. We must find other ways of doing it and must find out whether we can be successful. Before any Government ever submitted such a proposal, they would have to win acceptance in both Houses, let alone among the public, of what would, in effect, be a massive and intrusive measure that would require information that is got for one purpose to be given to the private sector for another. You would have to have a very good case that you had tried every other conceivable, reasonable way of targeting those people for their own benefit to lower their bills and their carbon footprint, thereby assisting us to meet our national targets. I am not saying that that is not somewhere down the road, but it is certainly not on the agenda at present. It might have been thought to be on the agenda in the past, but it is not a route. As the noble Lord will appreciate, given his former role, passing information about benefit claimants, let alone tax credit claimants, to the private sector would be highly sensitive, and is not a route that we will use at present. I am not saying that it will be ruled out in future, however.