Electricity and Gas (Community Energy Saving Programme) Order 2009

My Lords, I will not detain the House long on the orders; I will attempt to damn them with faint praise. First, they are fairly complex instruments and fairly difficult to understand. I am not sure that, for the size of the task, they are the right tool. To put this into context, about 27 per cent of carbon emissions come from the household sector; there are about 22 million houses out there, just a handful of which are at the standards we would want to build them to in 2016; and 14 million of those are already well below standard. Where does this get us in terms of that stock, 80 per cent of which will still be around in 2050? These two measures, although commendable to a certain degree, are fairly small in their effect on the overall picture. In fact, I believe that the CESP is expected to affect 90,000 households, which is about 0.5 per cent of the total housing stock, yet we require something like a 29 per cent cut in carbon emissions in the sector, as we heard earlier. One thing that I find fundamentally flawed about this—I am slightly off piste in terms of my party on this point—is whether the energy companies are really the right people to deliver the programme. I was interested in the evidence base in paragraph 3, which stated that household energy suppliers are well placed to deliver carbon dioxide savings from their customers. It states that they are well placed to inform them of the potential measures to save money—to save energy. The key thing for an energy company is to produce efficient energy and to sell it to its consumers. To get them to concentrate in this area is a bit like putting the editor of the News of the World in charge of phone-tapping policy. If we sat on the board of one of those energy companies—perhaps some people here do, I do not know—I cannot imagine that high up on the agenda of their key performance indicators is carbon emissions and energy saving targets. Clearly, they will be making sure that they comply with government targets, and the orders increase them, but I think that it is an area of delivery that is bound to fail. I want to ask the Minister two questions. Normally, when we go through these orders, we all ask about 10 questions. Usually, the Official Opposition get about half of them answered; the Lib Dems about 25 per cent. I shall stick to two questions. We talked earlier this afternoon, in the debate about the White Paper on moving to a low-carbon economy, about the North Sea gas transition programme, which is the big game, the big opportunity. I know that the orders are included in the White Paper as part of that overall reduction, but, for me, that is key: the street-by-street conversion policy that goes through UK plc. It may be very difficult to do, but that is the big game. To me, this seems like a sideshow. How do those two come together? At the other end of the scale, do the orders really tackle the issue of the poor consumer in fuel poverty in the north-east of England—an example I was asked to give by one of my colleagues—who is elderly, a tenant and whose landlord is not interested in any of this, but just collecting a rent, who is on a prepayment meter, which are still being installed throughout the country? Do the orders help that citizen to get out of their fuel poverty and get their landlord to put in proper energy-saving measures that ensure that they can live securely and warmly in their environment?