My Lords, I have great sympathy for the words spoken by the noble Lord. He and I and one or two others in this House have campaigned on fuel poverty for a number of years, although he will remember that, when as a Minister he wrote his draft fuel poverty strategy, he hoped to eradicate it by 2010. That indicates what a difficult issue this is. I am grateful to the Government for, after cross-party lobbying, putting into the Bill a strategy for fuel poverty. I am very pleased about that.
This is very pertinent at the moment. I do not know if noble Lords noticed that as the storm went through the temperature dropped. I only just made it in on my train today. As I walked across, I could feel the temperature dropping. Elderly people particularly are getting very worried about how they will pay their fuel bills this winter. We know but many do not understand that if you are older and have heart problems, problems with blood circulation and so on, you do not need to get very cold for it to have a serious effect.
I have campaigned on this issue for as many years as I care to think about. In my 20s, I lived in Stockholm in Sweden where pensioners did not die in wintertime because they were too cold. They did not have arthritis. They lived in properly heated houses. Here we are in 2013 and we have still not managed to achieve that. I recognise that it is a very difficult problem but I hope that my noble friend can at least give us some warm words in response to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. Many noble Lords care passionately about this issue. It is time, as one of the richest nations in the world, that we dealt with it.