Prepayment Meters: Code of Practice

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist

Thursday 20th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how they will ensure that the new Ofgem Code of Practice regarding installing pre-payment meters for vulnerable and disabled customers will be enforced.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, the code of practice is a step in the right direction, with better protections for vulnerable households, increased scrutiny of supplier practices, and redress measures when prepayment meters were wrongly installed. Ofgem has now confirmed that it will put strengthened rules into energy company licences so that they can be enforced. The Government will monitor very closely the behaviour of suppliers and regulators and will not hesitate to intervene again if necessary.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, after the appalling behaviour of energy suppliers forcibly installing prepayment meters at the homes of the most vulnerable and disabled, why is Ofgem’s new voluntary scheme not compulsory? Worse, the categories “High Risk—Do not install” and “Medium Risk—Further assessment required” are confused and rely on energy supplier staff to make medical judgments. Someone awaiting a transplant is high risk but, post transplant, when they are medically still very vulnerable, they may not be. As Scope pointed out, does a customer with dementia even have the capacity to respond to chasing calls and emails? Does the Minister think that staff from energy suppliers should be making these medical decisions, and how will safe practice be enforced?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The noble Baroness asked a number of questions. First, Ofgem does not have the right to impose rules without consultation. It is an independent regulator accountable to Parliament, but this voluntary code is agreed by all suppliers; it will be put into their contracts by October. There were some nuances and details perhaps lost in the Ofgem announcement on Tuesday about the code of practice. The medium-risk group is always protected by the precautionary principle so, if there is any doubt that the consumer is financially vulnerable or likely to disconnect, they must not install a prepayment meter. The vulnerable group includes any family with children under five, the elderly over 65, those with many other serious medical conditions including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and those in temporary situations such as pregnancy and bereavement. Ofgem has worked very hard to try to include everybody in the prevention of installation of prepayment meters and will continue to do so. They have all been paused for the moment.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

As the noble Lord will appreciate, it will be published when the work is complete. The work is ongoing within all departments—the noble Baroness looks shocked.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I come back to the question I asked in the previous group: at what point does the dashboard—this list—get frozen? What happens if it is frozen in the middle of December? This is just impossible. If there is going to be a list and work published, as things emerge and more regulations are added to the list—which I completely understand; I think we would rather see them added to it—we need to understand how it fits in with the impact assessments and with consultation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I do not accept the noble Lord’s point. The dashboard is just a list of retained EU law that will be subject to the provisions of the Bill but will not be part of the Bill.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I apologise to the Committee for continuing this point, but the Government have said repeatedly that they do not want to increase the regulatory burden. We have had the debate about what that means, but if we are not going to increase it and the dashboard is part of the tally of what that burden is, how does it get connected back in?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The dashboard does not have any legal status. It is simply a list of the job of work that all the departments will have to do, reviewing each bit of retained EU law to work out which bucket it will fall into. These are legitimate conversations to have in Committee, so we can go on debating this. I know that your Lordships feel sorry for me up here, but I have two Ministers behind me and the Leader of the House. If there is something that I cannot answer directly—

International Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a patron of the Traveller movement. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for securing this important debate today and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Library and many others for their excellent and helpful briefings. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, who described the moving experience of his own family.

This year’s theme of ordinary people who let genocide happen is extremely important for all of us at a time when we hear and see rises in anti-Semitism and other discrimination. In the brief time available, I want to make some links with things that are happening today but started in the early 1930s.

Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous comment about remaining silent even in the face of evidence begins:

“First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist …

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew”,

and ends:

“Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out”.

Most people do not understand that he spoke from his own experience: he was a pro-Nazi supporter in the very early 1930s. He did not support the Jewish community at all, and he recognised that in his later life.

For me, what happened to the Roma and Gypsy community in the 1930s was appalling. The Porajmos, or the Devouring, started in 1933 with prejudice and discrimination. Tens of thousands of Romani men, women and children across Germany and occupied Europe were first badly treated, and then killed. The human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe has reported this year on compelling testimony she heard about discrimination, a lack of publicly provided sites for our Traveller community and the barriers that people in the GRT community face in developing sites. In particular, she commented on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, and how it is much harder for our Traveller community to live their way of life.

In that same visit in the middle of 2022, she also commented on addressing the increasingly toxic discourse against trans people. That, too, is how genocide started against the LGBT—particularly the “T”—community in May 1933, when the Nazis raided and looted the Institute for Sexual Science. Some employees just disappeared and were assumed to have been murdered; their archives and research were burned. During the Holocaust, transgender people were deported to concentration camps, and many did not survive.

Much more recently, in this last year there has been a chilling echo of what happened to Polish children in the 1930s after Germany invaded Poland, where they were sent to German families and to SS home schools if they were thought to be of previous Germanic descent. This year, in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine, we have seen Ukrainian children being removed and sent to Russia and “adopted” by Russian families. That is appalling.

If Martin Niemöller were alive today, he would be asking us to look at and think carefully about all we see and do. It is not just about the horrific end of lives; it is about the slow and gradual movement towards othering particular communities and feeling that they are not part of us and that this is acceptable. He said:

“We preferred to keep silent. We are … not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in … 1933 or 1934 … 14,000 Protestant pastors”


had intervened? He believed that millions of lives would have been saved. We all need to heed that challenge and speak up.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Can I say at this point that this is a time-limited debate? If people exceed the limit consistently, there will be very little time for the Minister to respond. This is a very difficult debate for me to intervene on, but I just make that reminder.

Covid-19: Vaccines and Further Variants

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, despite the Minister’s comments at the beginning of this Question, Nature published a report on 18 March saying that while vaccines protect against the omicron subvariant, their effect really does not last long. Will the Government place an order for the recently approved Evusheld as a pre-exposure prophylaxis drug, which Ministers have promised the very vulnerable since July last year? What steps are the Government taking to protect the severely immunocompromised in the longer term, including in their decision on who will be eligible for free lateral flow tests?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I will do my best to answer the noble Baroness’s question, but it stretches into the health brief somewhat. On protection for the very vulnerable, on Monday we announced the rollout of the programme for the second booster for the vulnerable and the over-75s. It is not possible to predict what the long-term vaccine programme will look like, but undoubtedly there will be another vaccine in the autumn. We already have contracts in place for vaccines that we believe will be effective against any future variants and those trials have already started. Given the way the UK is approving these vaccines, with a rolling programme of research going to the regulatory authority, they can be approved very quickly and could even be introduced by September or October this year.