Fuel Poverty

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered fuel poverty.

I am grateful for your arrival, Mr Streeter. “My home lets out the heat. My heating fuel is expensive, and I can’t afford it. I am in fuel poverty.” That is the personal testimony of more people in my constituency than anywhere else in England, and the UK is the leakiest country in the EU, so homes in my neck of the woods could be among the leakiest in Europe. This is a national issue, not an isolated problem for the west country. Fuel poverty affects 10% of the population of England, and the situation is even worse in Scotland, Wales and Northern—may I say that I am so grateful to everyone who has turned up this morning to support and take part in the debate?

Jenny Holland, from the Association for the Conservation of Energy, said this just before the spending review:

“Of the 26 million households in the UK, four out of five have poor levels of energy efficiency, rated band D or below. As today’s findings clearly show, this places our nation right at the bottom of the European rankings for housing and fuel poverty and represents an energy bill crisis for UK consumers. Ministers must now embrace the opportunity for a national energy efficiency infrastructure programme”.

[Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining the debate. As an MP representing a constituency in Northern Ireland, I concur with his viewpoint, but does he agree with me that opening up infrastructure funding for energy efficiency improvements has massive potential both to improve lives by reducing fuel poverty and to save the taxpayer money by reducing NHS winter costs?

[Derek Thomas]

Certainly. I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. She is absolutely right. Reducing the impact on hospitals in terms of admissions, but also creating skilled jobs and reducing emissions, are good reasons to use the infrastructure money to tackle and solve this problem.

I congratulate successive Governments on initiatives that they have introduced to tackle fuel poverty. I also congratulate the many MPs who have addressed this issue in this place. There have already been many Westminster Hall debates on fuel poverty, including one just a few weeks ago. However, my constituency demonstrates that not enough has been achieved. My constituency has more leaky homes than anywhere else in rural England. Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly are in the top three areas in England for homes without central heating; 14% of homes in Cornwall do not have central heating and 22% of homes in the Isles of Scilly, which is also in my constituency, do not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) on securing this important debate. Alas, this is the second time in my short career as a shadow Minister that I have had to speak about fuel poverty. That underlines just how serious a problem it is. Today’s discussion has again been informative and shed light on many pressing matters. Alas, it is not light that millions of our constituents need, but heat.

Let me go through some of the points that hon. Members made. My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) spoke at great length about his frustration at the Government’s lack of action on energy efficiency. I, too, will touch on that issue shortly. Other Members talked about the fact that we have the worst fuel poverty in Europe with the exception of Estonia. I have been to Estonia, and I saw the 1950s Stalinist housing bocks that spread out across the country, so that is a sad fact if true.

Members spoke about prepayment meters and the fact that the very poorest—those least able to pay—are charged more for their energy. That is a perverse state of affairs, if ever there was one. In the highlands and islands of Scotland, some districts struggle with 71% fuel poverty, which is completely outrageous in the sixth-richest country in the world. The hon. Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), who sits on the all-party group on fuel poverty and energy efficiency, spoke about the trilemma of high energy costs, low incomes and poor energy efficiency. I was struck by the words of a doctor that she quoted, who said he wished he could prescribe insulation rather than medication. We must highlight that not investing in energy efficiency and not having proper fuel poverty strategies is a false economy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) painted a moving picture of the grim reality that fuel poverty represents for millions of people across the country. The hon. Member for St Ives said that our nation has some of the oldest, leakiest housing stock in Europe. Fuel poverty saps people’s ability to work and study, and to get ahead in life. It affects people’s health and wellbeing. I am keen to hear the Minister address the question whether the Government will make affordable warm homes a basic human right that all people should be able to access.

[Ms Ritchie]

The hon. Gentleman is making some compelling points. Does he agree that we need to include energy efficiency in infrastructure spending to deal with the issue of fuel poverty throughout our housing stock, whether in the social or private rented sector?

[Clive Lewis]

Yes, I agree. I went to see the new head of the National Infrastructure Commission, Lord Adonis, with Frontier Economics and E3G, which have been quoted. We asked him whether energy efficiency could be made a priority in the National Infrastructure Commission’s first tranche of spending. I will not say we were given short shrift—he was very polite—but I understand that he will not make the case for such spending in his recommendations. I think that is a missed opportunity. Unfortunately, the Treasury still refuse to see energy efficiency spending as infrastructure spending. Frontier Economics made a compelling case when it said that the characteristics of spending on energy efficiency are exactly the same as those of traditional infrastructure spending on, say, transport or broadband. We will press Lord Adonis on that issue, and I will happily keep the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie) informed.

I have worked on fuel poverty and participated in debates on that issue, and I am struck by how easy it is to get sucked into the statistics and detail. Other Members made that point, too. Clearly, the detail is an essential to understanding not only the scale of the problem and the sheer depth of the Government’s failure, but the resources required to turn the problem around.

Before I get into the stats, let me remind hon. Members that behind every percentile, every missed target and figure and every set of depressingly high numbers there is a fellow human being. Perhaps they are one of the thousands of people expected to die this winter as a result of living in a cold home. Perhaps they are over 65—an age group in which one person is expected to die every seven minutes because of fuel poverty. I am sure someone much better at maths than I am will be able to work out statistically how many will have died over the course of this debate. Perhaps they are disabled, unable to get out of their home, and reduced to living in one or two rooms for the duration of the winter because they fear racking up excessively high fuel bills. Perhaps they are one of the 1.5 million children living in fuel poverty across the UK. Perhaps they are one of the Prime Minister’s strivers, and are working as hard as they can but are still struggling to heat their home. There is somebody in work in more than half of the 2.3 million households in fuel poverty.

That is the reality behind the statistics. Those are the people who, this winter, will pay a heavy price for the Government’s failure to tackle this issue meaningfully. I see that failure compounded day in, day out. I sit on the Energy Bill Committee, and throughout our proceedings the Government have routinely used fuel poverty as an excuse for inaction or, worse still, for slashing the UK’s renewables industry. They claim to care so much about poorer consumers, yet by attacking the two cheapest renewables—onshore wind and solar—they damage investor confidence, increase risk, and push up the price of renewable investment and, ultimately, our energy bills. At the same time, they are setting an incredible strike price for nuclear-generated electricity and are happy to heap those costs on to consumer energy bills.

One of the most cost-effective ways of meeting our climate change commitments and tackling fuel poverty is to increase energy efficiency, which has been mentioned so many times today, but it is being fundamentally undermined. Any serious attempt to tackle fuel poverty will require serious action to improve our housing stock. Poor-quality housing and fuel poverty are almost inseparable. The figures speak for themselves: 73% of households in fuel poverty live in properties with the lowest energy ratings—E, F or G. Only 2% live in properties with the highest energy ratings—A, B or C. The Government’s goal of ensuring a minimum energy-efficiency rating of band C by 2030 is woefully inadequate.