So we must help him to persuade others on the other issue, the decarbonisation target.
I will try not to be repetitive, because I agree with many of the things already said. I particularly welcome the fact that we are going to be monitoring things as they go along, that there will not just be an end target but targets in between, and we will see what is going on. The Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000, and the Home Energy Conservation Act before it, were both Private Members’ Bills. One of the problems with Private Members’ Bills is that they are not actually owned by the Government, and so they were not part of a big department getting together and putting legislation forward. Both those Bills suffered from that, because in many ways they were allowed to just drift along. That is a slight exaggeration, but the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000, my own Act, drifted so much so that at the end the
previous Government wanted to get rid of it completely. When the coalition Government came in—it was one in, one out—they thought it was ripe for the picking. We pointed out that you need that Bill if you are really into localism and are going to use local authorities—another thing I welcome in this regard. Maybe we will do a little better this time, because this has been an important piece of work done by a government department.
I commend to noble Lords the White Paper, Fuel Poverty: a Framework for Future Action. It will help people who have already contacted us because they were worried about one or two items that the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, pointed out. It will answer some of their questions. This is not the final document and strategy. A more detailed strategy will come after the Bill has passed into law, so that we can co-ordinate it properly.
I will highlight one or two things. Everybody has talked about properties that are difficult to deal with for various technical reasons, but something that has always bothered me is that a large number of the fuel poor live in the private rented sector. Many things that we are trying to do are much harder to do in the private rented sector. I hope that, when the final strategy comes out, we can do something about that.
Some concerns that people have raised include the fact that we are changing the definition, and that it will be in secondary legislation. However, my experience of definitions being in primary legislation, in particular in the two Private Members’ Bills that became Acts that I talked about, was that it did not make any difference. Even though the target was in primary legislation, it seems that we are not going to hit it, so we have had to do something else. Therefore, history shows that that is not the total answer.
Many people who contacted us were worried about what the priorities and target dates will be. I hope that, as the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, said, we will be able to look into that before Report. Clearly, a lot of detail will be in the final strategy, and we will be able to make our suggestions.
Another area that has been mentioned is how we will pay for this and how we can stop putting extra burdens on the fuel poor when we are trying to deal with climate change and decarbonisation. The document indicates that the Government are acutely aware of the issue, and that we need to look at how to deal with it. Perhaps my noble friend will be able to indicate some of the forward thinking on the issues that I have raised.
The other area that I particularly welcome is the commitment to much more cross-departmental working. That may be something we will touch on when we debate the next amendment about something else. We hear this phrase time and time again, but it does not always happen. Somewhere in the document it says that the Government will set up a body to work across departments. That has been tried in the past and has not been terribly successful.
I will touch on one issue mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, who talked about dealing with streets. One thing that has been discovered by those
looking at who is fuel poor is that quite often they are peppered around streets. If you are trying to target your money at the fuel poor, sometimes you do not succeed if you take whole streets. This is not a worry with decarbonising, but trying to make money go around for the fuel poor is complicated. This is slightly disappointing, because it was talked about in the context of the Home Energy Conservation Act.
I will touch briefly on rural areas, to which my noble friend Lord Deben referred. As noble Lords know, I live in north Northumberland, which I think is even more rural than where my noble friend lives.