My Lords, I will make a few comments on what my noble friend said. The first is that we are extremely grateful to her and to the officials working with her for the briefing that some of us had fairly late last evening. All this was sprung on us at fairly short notice. The White Paper, Fuel Poverty: a Framework for Future Action, which is an immensely worthwhile document, contains a wealth of material. It is not always easy in a debate of this kind to do justice to it. It has been backed up by a paper produced in response to the consultation.
As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said in our debate on Tuesday when we discussed the problem of bills, not all of this is new. We have been aware of the Hills report, to which my noble friend referred, and the consultation paper. There were a good many responses to the consultation, which were referred to in the Government’s response. There is a wealth of material from which we can make an assessment of what the measures are likely to produce.
The first thing I will say on this is that the Government have been wise to recognise that the methodology of the previous fuel poverty target—how it was measured and what the appropriate responses were—has now really been shown to be wanting. That has inevitably meant that, in the light of Professor Hills’s report, that target and the methodology that accompanied it must be changed. I welcome very much what the Government now propose as the approach to this. It is not just a question of energy prices and relative incomes. There is far more to it than that. Without going into all the details, because I am sure noble Lords will have made their own studies of this, it is clear that there is much more to be done. Indeed, it is only if you measure the problem in an appropriate way that you can really devise and decide on the necessary measures to deal with it. That is an approach which I warmly welcome. If it continues to be measured in the wrong way, of course the authorities and the industry would be tempted
to continue to use what have turned out to be often very ineffective policies to deal with this, and would give a false view of the size and severity of the problem.
This is a welcome new approach. I have read some of the documents which have been issued in the past day or two by the interest groups which represent the fuel poor. Although some of them wisely recognise the merits of the new approach, there has been an almost instinctive reaction of, “Well, you are abandoning the targets and not putting anything in their place”. My noble friend has indicated that her amendment will in fact lead to new targets. The other complaint is that it is not now going to be in statute, it will be in regulations. The fact is that you are going to advance this policy properly, it will have to be dealt with over time. That can only be done by regulations. My noble friend’s amendment would introduce the power to do so. I have never read an amendment which includes the phrase “The Secretary of State must” so many times. This will be a considerable reassurance to those who have been anxious that the Government are in some way weakening in their policy on this. They are not. It is a very real social policy leading to considerable hardship. Anyone who has represented constituents recently or in the past will be aware of the problem. Of course, it has got so much more difficult with rising prices.
Some of the methodology which stems from the Hills report is distinctly complicated. I found myself on Tuesday night trying to understand some of the charts in the White Paper. A particular chart on page 18 required having a fair number of towels around one’s head to try to understand it; I think that I fell asleep over it. The Minister’s officials were able to describe the meaning of some of this in our meeting yesterday. It illustrates the complexity of the problem that has been dealt with. There are all sorts of reasons why some households suffer from acute fuel poverty. They need to be examined in all their detail. This is what the department has tried to do with the help of Professor Hills’s report. We shall have to see how successful that is. I had not realised what a difference it makes whether you are connected to the gas grid or not. Yet the figures in the chart show clearly that that is a major factor. If you do not have access to mains gas, you are far more likely to be in serious fuel poverty.
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Of course, everybody knows that cavity wall insulation and loft insulation are of very considerable help in reducing your fuel bills. That is the basis for the whole of the Green Deal policy. Noble Lords may wish to look at that and how far it is getting, but I have always had doubts about whether the golden rule is ever going to be able to be sufficiently identified; the golden rule being that you borrow the money to make those improvements and you repay it back out of the savings in fuel bills that you will have had. I should confess that I have had cavity wall filling and loft filling. Recently I invested in a new condensing boiler. The advantage for a couple of elderly people is that we can keep our house rather warmer and the effect on the bills is that they are perhaps not as high as they otherwise would have been. However, there are some
quite serious questions to be asked there. For some, it is a question of whether you have central heating and so on. It is all spelled out in this chart and at some stage it would be jolly nice to have a detailed description of what that actually shows. However, it indicates the complexity of the problem with which the Government have been dealing.
I was impressed yesterday evening by the descriptions and information given by the officials in charge of this. They really seem to understand what they are talking about. However, there is no question but that we will need to wait to see whether this is going to, one might say, cut the mustard. Will defining the measures better and tailoring them to it better help deal with the problem? When one is changing things, as one has to here—I hope I have indicated my view on that—it is impossible to stick to a target based on an old and obviously unsatisfactory methodology. The amendment makes it perfectly clear that the Government have to find new targets and do so within a reasonable time. That is something that we can support.
Before I sit down, I will mention one point that I raised yesterday evening. The Minister will therefore be aware of this. I have had immediate representations from the National Grid, which asked whether the change in methodology, or the change in the definition, will affect its investment policy, particularly in respect of extending the gas grid to communities which do not yet have it. It has a policy on this and has an investment programme broadly based on the old definition and the old methodology. This is something that will need to be examined very quickly. In responding to the ENA and its policy director, Tony Glover, after our meeting last night, I said that I got the impression that the department would be very willing to have probably not just one meeting but several to really thrash this out so that the networks can know exactly what they are going to be asked to do. It is clear, as I said earlier, that whether you are connected to the gas main is a major indicator of whether you are likely to suffer from fuel poverty. I think that National Grid and the various gas networks will try to do their very best to meet that requirement. However, they need to be satisfied that they are, as it were, reflecting the new definition of fuel poverty, the new target and the new methods that will be needed to deal with it. That may be a detail, but on the basis of the chart I referred to, it is quite an important issue.
Finally, I very much welcome this new approach. The Government deserve support for carrying it through and I hope that the Committee will fell able to give that support. It will need to be sold and presentation is very important. People need to be confident that the Government’s intention on this issue is as firm as that of previous Governments. However, I am sure that my noble friend and her honourable and right honourable friends will make sure that that is the case.