Warm Home Discount Regulations 2011

My Lords, like my noble friend I, too, welcome these regulations. They bring a little more certainty to what has hitherto been a rather uncertain variety of schemes. My main concern has always been how the suppliers are intended to identify the householders that they are supposed to help. My noble friend will remember that we had some discussion about that on the question of the Green Deal. It is on these energy discounts and what have previously been called rebates on bills that the problem has been at its most acute. I do not need to go over the detail of this, but when we first debated the CERT scheme—it must be nearly four years ago—two things were evident. One was the considerable hostility of the industry—the suppliers—to becoming involved in this sort of activity. I think attitudes have dramatically changed, and I find in talking to industry representatives a clear recognition that helping those who are most likely to suffer fuel poverty is indeed very much part of their social obligation. I welcome this change of heart; a variety of factors have contributed to it and I do not necessarily need to go into them. The second problem, as I said, has always been that of identifying the households. We pressed former Ministers very hard on this and eventually secured a clause in the Pension Bill which allowed Ministers in the Department of Work and Pensions to supply the names of pension credit pensioners, as households likely to be most in need. Given the problem that had been identified—I will forbear from giving a quotation in Latin, because that now is rather frowned upon in this House.