My Lords, I support the noble Baroness in her efforts in this area. I had better indicate that—I cannot remember—I may be a co-chair of the All-Party Group as well. I cannot remember what the job was last time. The noble Baroness has introduced the amendment so well and with all the facts that I do not need to say very much at all. I first became aware of this problem when I was a Member of Parliament in Christchurch and a family in the constituency was affected by it. One of the family members died because of a flue wrongly installed by a builder. I have been aware of this matter ever since and have campaigned a bit but, I have to say, the noble Baroness has taken this much farther forward and with much more energy than I have ever done and I am grateful to her.
One of the problems that we have come across over the years—and I have proposed amendments to other Bills about this—is that the Government always say, “It’s not us”, and, “It’s not appropriate in this Bill”. I have a feeling that this may be what the Minister will say today. Interestingly, I notice that there are some people who know about it, because the civil servants behind her changed between the first and second amendments that we are discussing. Somebody in her department clearly knows something about this. It is time that we took this seriously—we have that opportunity now, as we have so many programmes where people go into other people’s houses and install equipment that might have faults in it of the kind we are discussing, when they could easily fit something else or easily detect where carbon monoxide is. Not only should we be doing this, but we should keep much better records; as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, one of the problems is trying to get records of how many people there are. The worst thing is that sometimes even doctors do not recognise the symptoms. There have been cases where someone has turned up at a surgery but the symptoms have not been diagnosed and they have gone home and died. We need to take this more seriously and to stop making excuses about why we cannot do some of the things that are—as the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, said earlier—common sense.
If the Minister cannot accept the amendment, I hope that she will help us get something that we can put down on Report that will deal with this once and for all. We can have the cross-departmental working that we are going to have on fuel poverty on this as well.
3.30 pm