I am pleased to follow my noble friend. In addressing his amendments he covered, in part, some of the points I will raise in relation to my own. It is fair to say that the four amendments I tabled seek to add a bit of muscle and detail to the Government’s commitment. I will talk about this more in my later remarks, but the rather late insertion of concerns about fuel poverty into the Bill mean that it is rather late in the day for some of the amendments that we put forward, which are of a probing character. Therefore, one would hope that the spirit of these amendments will be carried into secondary legislation: that is, statutory instruments, of which many are likely to be forthcoming.
The existing legislation, namely the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000, was steered through this House by the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, who I regret is unable to be here today. All credit should be given to her for her efforts in that area, although I was always a little bit dubious about plucking a date out of the air. I know that the date was the subject of some arm-wrestling between the then Labour Government and the Back-Benchers. However, the fact is that it was an attempt. At the time there was a degree of optimism because, as noble Lords will recall, energy prices, particularly gas prices, were falling. We could see households moving out of what was known at the time as fuel poverty in quite considerable numbers. Not only were gas prices falling and thus people’s disadvantage in the energy market diminishing, there was also a sense that the general economic prosperity of the time meant that the situation of the poor would become easier and, as the Americans say, all the boats would rise together. Unfortunately, all the boats did not rise but the price of energy subsequently did, and the poor were left stranded in their inadequately insulated and poorly built homes.
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Amendment 104D deals with housing conditions in two steps. Priority would be given to the homes that are hardest to heat, and where the household income is less than 60% of median income after housing costs. That is the Government’s own definition of poverty. The objective is for those householders to be helped by 2020. Over the succeeding 10 years, the remaining housing stock would be brought up to level B of the energy efficiency ratings. Rating B is the level that a new house is currently expected to meet when it is constructed. This is an ambitious target that would take some 17 years to meet. We are told that 70% of fuel-poor households are living in E, F and G-rated buildings, so we are talking about improving something like 1.7 million homes over the next six years, from 2014 to 2020.
It is certainly the case that houses with SAP ratings of E, F and G are where most of the fuel poor live. Moreover, only 7% of them have, for example, a condensing boiler. It is not just a question of insulating the houses; it is equally important to have more efficient means of heating water and providing central heating for these families. We know also that some 6 million households are not connected to the gas grid. These households are the ones where the fuel poverty gap, where it exists, is likely to be twice as wide as it is in households with gas boilers and central heating. Much the same can be said for a number of houses solid-walled accommodation.
The point of using the SAP rating is that it is probably the most up to date definition of disadvantage in respect of fuel costs. If you live in a house with an E, F or G SAP rating, it is likely that your home is very expensive to heat. The concept of low income, high cost is the basis of the Hills report, which defines fuel poverty and the fuel poverty gap. My noble friend has already referred to the fact that, according to the Hills report, we have seen a reduction in the number of households in fuel poverty from 4.5 million to 2.4 million. My colleague suggested, perhaps somewhat cynically, that this was an easy way of massaging the statistics. Frankly, there is a bit more to it than that, in so far as we now have a method of calculation that is not as vulnerable to fluctuations in price, which was the kind of problem that we had in the early part of the last decade. When gas prices were falling, the problems seemed to be decreasing, but in fact we know that the people who were living in these homes were not really very much warmer because most of the heat that they were paying for was still going out of the window or under the doors or not being properly contained within the building itself.
It is not unreasonable to use the SAP rating as the basis to do this, because one of the things about heritable property is that you cannot hide it. One of the things about local government taxes is that people do not really like rates, as we used to call them, and they do not like revaluation because you cannot hide property. The fact is that these homes, which are inadequately constructed, will not disappear because the price of gas goes down, as they seemed to do in the early part of the past decade.
This amendment is suggested as a means of tackling the issue of fuel poverty. Most of the fuel poor live in the most poorly insulated houses that are the hardest to heat. If we were to treat them in a step-by-step manner, we could be serious about tackling this problem. We need to get far more from the Government than the quite understandable expressions of concern about this social problem. We need a programme that will indicate how they propose to address this. They have had the Hills report for many months. In the summer we had the acceptance of the report and its incorporation within this legislation. I would have thought that five months later we should have the beginnings of some kind of programme or plan to address the issue.
I understand that these amendments are not perfect, but they enjoy the backing of a wide range of community, faith and campaigning groups that have been engaged in addressing this issue for many years. These groups
are not expecting the Government to embrace these amendments tonight, but what they are looking for are clear indications that we are getting beyond the definition of the problem and moving towards a clear commitment to solving it. In this process we want to see clear reports, and also proper cognisance of our responsibilities under the 2008 Climate Change Act. We realise when we hear talk of green taxes, changes in ECO and the possibility of direct taxation being the means of funding some of these programmes, that we need to get assurances that we will not throw the environmental baby out with the bathwater.
We also have to recognise that we have come a long way. When I first came to Westminster more than 30 years ago, fuel poverty was not a given. It was an item of dispute and debate. The conversation around the Hills report suggested that the problem of fuel poverty was largely one of definition. Of course it was a rough and ready definition that was dreamt up by a young researcher in the 1970s who was doing work on poverty in Kensington. He was a man called Malcolm Wicks who went on to become a very distinguished Energy Minister in another place. Much of his work was given over to looking at how we could address this problem. Nearly 40 years after Malcolm wrote his first report—in which he quite starkly laid down the choice of “eat or heat” for the elderly of Kensington—we should be dealing with this in a far more organised and programmatic way than has been shown in the rather well intended but often ill directed scattergun approach that successive Governments have had.
I like to think that my amendments provide some milestones on a route that could be taken towards resolving this. I shall not press them, because they are in many respects of a probing character, and I know that on Report we should be a bit further advanced than that, but I should like some indication from the Minister of the Government’s thinking on the specifics of handling this problem. The excuses that we had in Committee on other matters about awaiting statutory instruments coming out of the air—coming out of the heavens—are not good enough. We know what the problem is.
We know that there are means whereby its resolution can be easily identified—not always easily resolved but easily identified. Let us use the inadequacy of our housing stock and the manner in which we are currently grading that inadequacy, as the means whereby we set out priorities which, over a period of 17 years, could probably eliminate the best part of 70% to 80% of fuel poverty in this country by a definition which, I think, is now accepted as being clearer, more robust and more statistically sound than Malcolm Wicks’s figure out of the air. If we could do that, we would do a great deal to enhance the memory of a colleague of many of us for whom we had great respect. One of his life’s causes was the resolution of that problem. I am not saying that we should do it for Malcolm Wicks; I am saying that we should do it for the people who will be cold and miserable in what will probably be a serious winter. Their health will be endangered and they may not see another winter after this because of the houses in which they live.