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12.5 pm
Mr. Tony Baldry (Banbury): There are often arguments about the definition of poverty and about whom we should consider to be living in poverty. However, if we use the commonly accepted definition of fuel poverty, there can be absolutely no argument about who is suffering from it--it is those living in households
that have to spend more than 10 per cent. of their income on fuel to provide adequate heat. That is a sizeable and substantial percentage of household income to spend simply on keeping warm.
Mr. Brake: Would the hon. Gentleman be surprised to learn that, according to a letter to one of his constituents, at least one hon. Member in the Chamber--the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth)--does not
- accept the concept of "fuel poverty"?
One issue that has been highlighted in the Bill is the dreadful number of people living in fuel poverty in the United Kingdom. According to the Library's figures--which deal only with England--one household in five in England, amounting to approximately 5 million households, are suffering from fuel poverty. However, the problem is even worse than that. As the Library goes on to observe:
As one in five households in England are suffering from fuel poverty, every English Member will have many constituents who are living in fuel poverty. We therefore all have an interest in ending it, and an incentive to put the matter right.
The extent of fuel poverty is all the more disappointing because it is occurring against the background of falling fuel prices. Since privatisation, consumers' gas and electricity costs have decreased by about 30 per cent. Moreover, consumers generally have realised other benefits from privatisation.
Recently, the new Director-General of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets appeared before the Select Committee on Trade and Industry, of which I am a member, and he observed that 5 million people who had
The words "energy efficiency" have often been used in today's debate, and the Bill enjoins the Secretary of State to establish a policy ensuring that people living in fuel poverty are able to keep warm at a reasonable cost. However, the Library's research paper for this debate makes a point that has not yet been made sufficiently forcibly today. A stark sentence in the paper's introduction states:
The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mrs. Gilroy) gave the Government credit for releasing more capital receipts to local authorities. The Government deserve credit for that, but those capital receipts result largely from the sale of council houses and most of those wishing to buy their council houses or flats have now done so. Money was also released to local authorities for home improvements as a consequence of large-scale voluntary transfers. Those opportunities will not arise again.
It was announced earlier this year that council tax increases would be substantially above the rate of inflation. That begs the following question: where in future will local authorities find sufficient funds to maintain and improve their existing housing stock? Improvements to existing housing stock are not simply a matter of putting rolls of insulating material in people's lofts; they often involve quite expensive local government capital grant programmes of improving windows, doors and so on. We need some indication of the Government's long-term thinking.
My final point relates to the new home energy efficiency scheme, which is rather inelegantly known as HEES 2. The Government are to be congratulated on introducing the programme, and I am sure that Ministers at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions have to work hard in the public expenditure survey round with their colleagues in the Treasury to secure the funds. I hope that all-party support for the programme will make their work easier in future PES rounds.
Perhaps when the Minister replies to the debate, he will be able to help me with a particular concern. The Government have embarked on an ambitious programme. We are told that some 4 million households will be eligible for HEES and that the grant maximum for installing insulation and improving household heating will rise from £315 to £700 for households using mains gas, solid fuel, oil or off-peak electricity for heating. In addition, there is a new HEES-plus scheme for people aged 60 and over, for which around 3.7 million households will be eligible.
I have two questions for the Minister. I understand that £260 million has been allocated to the first two years of the programme. However, £260 million divided by 8 million eligible households would provide approximately £32 per household. How will the new HEES programme prioritise? How will people know about it? I am sure that many constituents who read reports of this debate will be interested to know how they can get a grant of £700. Under the new HEES-plus scheme, the maximum grant is £2,000. How will that be achieved? Given that, on the Government's own figures, some 8 million households are eligible for HEES or HEES-plus and only £260 million has been allocated to the programme for the next two years, is the Minister confident that he will be able to extract sufficient money from his colleagues in the Treasury in subsequent years to ensure that the programme will not run until the £260 million is exhausted and then he will say, "Terribly sorry, but that's it"? If we are to achieve long-term improvements in the housing stock, we must recognise
that such schemes will be expensive and that it will be a long haul until all eligible households are improved. If we do not, it will be a presentational cheat.
Mr. Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South):
I shall try to be brief, because I know that many hon. Members want to take part in the debate. I also feel that I have probably had more than my fair share of the House's time since I first raised the matter in 1993. To all those with doubts and misgivings about the details of costs and how such a programme might be financed, I recommend the report of the all-party group on warm homes, which went into great detail about where the costs would occur, how they could be met and where savings were to be found.
I commend the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) and welcome his Bill. We often hear the phrase "joined-up government". The Bill illustrates what joined-up government should be about. It is part of a process that connects saving lives, raising the quality of life, addressing environmental damage and its impact and providing a safer environment.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test):
My hon. Friend will have heard general references in the Chamber to climate change savings that would result from the Bill. Is he aware that the potential savings from energy efficiency have been estimated at between 2.7 and 3.8 megatonnes of carbon? That is equivalent to, or greater than, the total savings outlined in the Government's transport White Paper. The worst-off people are likely to spend two or three times more on heating their homes to the same efficiency as more affluent people. Putting those two facts together, does he agree that a substantial joined-up government spin-off could arise from the passing of the Bill?
Mr. Simpson:
Yes, I do. My hon. Friend allows me to move on to the sense in which the Bill defines the new virtuous circle. It is a way of addressing a critical problem in society through a series of measures from which we will all be net gainers. I pay tribute to the cross-party work that has been done over a long period on spelling out where those gains are to be found. Some of us have found such gains in some of the previous Government's urban programmes for housing renewal, such as the city challenge initiatives. In my area, we found unexpected gains. Members of the public found that their contribution to reducing energy consumption and climate damage made them feel better as well as warmer. They felt that they were part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
An even more unexpected gain was found by the police. In neighbourhoods with serious housing renewal strategies, local kids were able to find local jobs. They ceased to be a pain in the neighbourhood's backside and
instead became the really nice kids who had just put in the double glazing, done the loft insulation or replaced the door. That transformed their position in the process of social renewal. That was the only explanation that the police could come up with for the collapse in levels of neighbourhood crime. We were told that kids who might otherwise be attracted to a life of crime were being drawn into programmes of social renewal, and that criminals do not like vibrant neighbourhoods where work is going on as it is harder to conduct burglaries and get away with it. The crime reduction was a factor that we never considered when we looked at the net gains of the matter.
We were told by health authorities and social services departments that there would be health gains, although not specifically in terms of pensioners and the reduction of the excess winter deaths, which are still a matter of shame and scandal for this country. However, the benefits include raising the quality of life for older people and children.
I pay tribute to the GPs and the primary care groups in Cornwall and Birmingham who piloted some of the initiatives in which people are able to get home insulation on prescription. That addresses some of the challenges mentioned to us by health authorities during winter crises, when they say that their ability to treat patients coming in is constrained by the number of pensioners that they are not allowed to release because local authorities are unable to say that there are conditions at home that are fit and safe for patients to return to. The Bill is concerned with a general raising of the standards and quality of life, as well as with addressing the unsexy issue of the quality of the housing stock in this country. I believe that that will be pivotal to the way in which we address sensible living and responsible environmental duties in the 21st century.
Some hon. Members are concerned that the Bill may be about coercion. In truth, it will be a measure in which the role of Government will be one of co-ordination rather than coercion. There is a huge amount of good will, to which the hon. Member for Southend, West referred, which cuts across the whole of society. People want to play a part in the process, and they want an overall plan. The Bill moves us towards that.
We will be required to come up with strategies to address the needs of people living in private rented accommodation. That was acknowledged at the warm homes hearings. It is not a criticism of the Bill, but it is a way of recognising that we are moving to an overall holistic programme to address the needs of those in private rented accommodation, as well as of those in public sector housing and privately owned accommodation.
The Bill will have the extra advantage of saving us money; I am absolutely certain of that. Every time we have stepped, with trepidation, into issues of how we finance this measure and what the overall cost would be, we have found at every stage that we would get back more than we would be required to shell out. We are not picking up on a definition of the fuel-poor families and whether they are the same as the poor in society, but we are addressing a long-term commitment to raise the quality of housing stock in which all families can have rights and aspirations to live sane and sensible lives.
About one in 20 households were classed as being in severe fuel poverty, needing to spend over 20 per cent. and 30 per cent.
of household income simply to keep warm.
switched gas suppliers can save around £65 each and in electricity 4 million have switched saving £20 a year each.
The director-general also said that, according to their analysis, most of those who have switched supplier, particularly gas supplier, are
the old, the poor and the people in the lowest social groupings.
Nevertheless, 14 million gas customers and 22 million electricity customers have stayed with their current supplier. If they were to switch supplier, they, too, could make savings.
The solution to the problem lies in the long-term improvement of housing stock.
Housing is not a particularly sexy subject, politically. It does not grab the headlines like health, class sizes or falling police numbers. However, I hope that, at some
stage, the Government will give us some indication of their strategy for long-term improvement of the housing stock. The Bill will not succeed without a long-term improvement of the housing stock, particularly in the public sector.
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