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12.24 pm
Mr. Andrew Hunter (Basingstoke): After three hours of debate, the salient points have been well and truly covered, so I shall not go over them again.
Initially, I had grave reservations about the Bill, but I have revised my judgment significantly. There is a school of thought that says that this is a centralising measure, increasing Government activity and responsibility and allowing the state further to intrude into matters that are rightly the concern of the individual. That argument does not stand up to investigation.
I want to draw attention to a deficiency in the Bill which has been given some consideration. In the debate it has become clear that the cost of investment that the programme will require is a great unknown, as are the source of the money, how it will be deployed and what will be the demand on the taxpayer. It is important for those questions to be answered in Committee.
I have revised my opinion on the Bill and hope that it will proceed to its Committee stage, because the principle behind it is extremely important. It should be given a fair wind, for one overriding reason: the percentage increase in deaths in winter is nothing short of a national scandal. The statistics have been repeated time and again. The comparison between this country and others is frightening. Any measure that earnestly seeks to solve that problem deserves to proceed.
There are also indirect and incidental reasons for supporting the Bill. One is the effect on national health service spending. We have heard that the cost of treating cold-related illnesses is approximately £1 billion a year. If the number of such illnesses can be reduced, clearly funds can be released for other areas of health expenditure, which will be immensely beneficial. There will also be a great indirect benefit to the environment. With effective insulation and other measures, there will be a reduction in polluting acid rain and greenhouse gases.
Mrs. Eileen Gordon (Romford):
The Bill is only short and the speeches have got shorter as the morning has worn on because many of the points have been covered.
Fuel poverty is a terrible problem, but it has many solutions and we can tackle it. I used to think that if a measure was sensible it could be effected quickly, but I have learned that the magic wand theory of politics--we want it to be done, therefore it shall be done--is perhaps a touch naive. I still find it strange that something that is so obviously good for everyone involved seems to be so difficult to implement.
I congratulate all my hon. Friends who have introduced similar Bills in the past, and I am happy to support the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) today, although we are not natural allies and this will probably be the only occasion on which I do so.
It is hard to accept that, with our climate, we have such badly insulated homes. To echo the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Baldry), insulation is not sexy. No one can say that loft insulation is glamorous, but it can make a huge difference to the warmth of a house. Why do we still allow energy to escape through roofs, windows and doors? It is a terrible waste, both for the individual household and for the environment.
The £100 winter fuel payment for all pensioner households is great, but let us consider how much further that money would go if homes were properly insulated and effectively heated. We have to stop being careless with our energy resources for the sake of those who suffer from the cold, and for our environment. Less wasted energy would lead to lower emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases, and that has got to be good.
Cold is a horrible, miserable thing to suffer. Like the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake), I can say that I have been there, done that and bought several T-shirts. Our first home did not have central heating and it was miserable and painful to live there in winter. We were lucky, because we were young--so the House can tell how long ago it was--and we were working so we could remedy the situation, which we did as soon as possible.
For the elderly, with less mobility and fewer resources, a cold home is not just miserable--it can be life threatening. We have heard this morning about the number of excess winter deaths, which stands as a testament to our failure to insulate our homes. It is unacceptable that one elderly person dies of cold, let alone the nearly 15,000 who died in the south-east in 1998-99. That is a tragedy for all their families and shameful for our society. As we have also heard, it costs £1 billion a year to treat cold-related illnesses. As the hon. Member for Banbury suggested, that money could be used in many other ways by the NHS.
As a society we should be able to organise ourselves to do something about that problem. We need a nationwide strategy and, as the Bill says, the best agency to draw up and ensure the implementation of that strategy is the Government. That will ensure that everybody is included and that provision is delivered equally throughout the country. With insulated homes and energy efficiency, we could--as my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mrs. Gilroy) said--have a win-win situation. We could save lives and fuel, create work, help the environment and ease the winter pressures on the NHS.
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough):
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Romford (Mrs. Gordon) for reminding us about the Romans and their central heating, but I remind her that the Romans also had a fondness for square sewerage pipes that led to all sorts of difficulties. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) on his luck in coming far enough up the ballot to be able to introduce the Bill and on the Bill itself.
My hon. Friend claimed in his speech that he was a man of no political ambition whatever. I suppose that I must believe him, but I applaud his enthusiasm and sense of humour. Hon. Members driving private Bills through the House need a good deal of both, from time to time, but they also need ambition. I am reasonably sure that my hon. Friend is not without any of those three qualities.
This Bill has the support of hon. Members from all parties, but it is also the occasion of sadness. Today's debate gives me my first relevant opportunity to pay a quiet tribute to my late friend Mr. Michael Colvin, who was also a sponsor of the Bill. I am sure that the House will join me in passing our condolences to his family.
Like all hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, I want to promote public welfare and health in this country. If the Bill achieves that, it deserves applause. It is clearly motivated by a worthy aspiration, but I hope that that can be translated into real Government commitment. My hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West distributed a briefing at the outset of the debate, which states:
The Bill has a broad sweep, and perhaps it could not be otherwise. It is not detailed, and that causes me some concern. Clause 3, for example, deals with the power to make regulations, and I must confess that I hate Bills that allow Ministers to make regulation. I believe that legislation should be passed in this House, not at the whim of a Minister in a Committee Room upstairs.
My hon. Friend the Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns) made a good point about the negative resolution process, and I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West has been attracted by that point. The House appears to be prepared to give Ministers a lot of regulatory powers these days. If we are not to have primary legislation on this matter, I hope that the House can have a little more power over what goes on in its name.
I do not want to criticise the thrust of the Bill, but a couple of matters deserve comment. They reflect what my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mr. Hunter)
said a moment ago. When I first came across the Bill, I had grave misgivings. Some remain, although many have been mitigated during the debate. However, I am worried about the absence of information on the costs involved.
Hon. Members are the protectors of public money, if nothing else. Our constituents will be the ones who pay for the Bill, and the ones who will benefit. Although I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West does not have the resources of the civil service to help him provide the details, the House and the public must, as soon as possible, be given the necessary information about the costs likely to be borne by the public in implementing the proposals.
I also have misgivings about the use of figures relating to "excess winter deaths", as they are called. Earlier, I intervened on the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), for whose scientific and medical knowledge I have great respect. I was particularly struck when, about two or three weeks ago, a journalist from my local newspaper, the Leicester Mercury, telephoned me to tell me that the warm homes campaign was suggesting that up to 90 people had died in my constituency last winter as a direct result of cold. My constituency is unusual in one sense, in that it returns a Conservative Member of Parliament. It is not unusual in that it is reasonably prosperous. There are obviously pockets of poverty and deprivation, but it is not the sort of place where one would expect two bus loads of people to die every year as a direct consequence of cold.
The Government has promised to eradicate fuel poverty. Labour's manifesto for the Scottish Parliament promised to do this in two terms. Senior Ministers are on the record saying fuel poverty must be ended, that it is a "scandal" and a "preventable scourge". Recently, an "Inter-Ministerial Group" has been set up to look at the problem and set a target date to eradicate fuel poverty.
I share the aspiration behind the Bill, and I hope that the Minister will be able to demonstrate that the Government are prepared to put that aspiration into direct effect.
Despite this, the Labour leadership has a poor record. Ministers have effectively "removed" over 1 million households from fuel poverty by attempting to change the definition.
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