Gavin Shuker
Main Page: Gavin Shuker (Independent - Luton South)Department Debates - View all Gavin Shuker's debates with the Department for Transport
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Davey
No, I will not.
Our first priority is to encourage consumers to switch suppliers, which could save households up to £200 per year. I am surprised that the right hon. Member for Don Valley was so negative about switching. The problem is that, despite rising prices, only one in six consumers switched their supplier in 2010. She was right that the number of people switching has been falling. There are several reasons for that, one of which, as she will know, is the plethora of energy tariffs. There are currently about 120 tariffs. We want fewer tariffs and much clearer pricing, so that customers can find a better deal more easily. That is the right approach. We support much of Ofgem’s work as part of its retail market review and will work with it to bring more transparency to the energy market.
Last month, my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister announced the deal that we secured working with the six big energy companies to give customers a guaranteed offer of the best tariff. From the autumn, suppliers will contact consumers annually to tell them which is the best tariff for their household, and if consumers call energy companies, they will have to offer them the best tariff. That is real progress—progress that Labour failed to make but which I have made in my first few months as Secretary of State.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
May I say what a privilege it is to have the opportunity to speak on the cost of living? All hon. Members would accept that the cost of living is the issue raised most often with us in our advice surgeries. In an era of static if not falling incomes, ensuring that our constituents can live their lives, support their families, continue to get work, put fuel in their car and keep their houses warm, is one of the most important issues we can debate in the House.
Recent media coverage seems to revolve around whether MPs know the cost of a pint of milk, and that decides whether they are in or out of touch with their constituents. I know the cost of a pint of milk, because I am particularly fond of a milky coffee with two sugars on a Saturday morning before I go to my advice surgery.
Jake Berry
It was 46p when I bought it last weekend, but since the general election, the cost of the pint of milk that I buy for my milky coffee has gone up by 10%. Although that is not the world’s greatest economic indicator, all hon. Members can accept that it is a symptom of the huge increase in the cost of fuel, which puts pressure on families in all our constituencies.
I am a great supporter of the great British pint—I am sure some of my colleagues think that litres are a European abomination—but one thing that we buy in litres is fuel. The cost of fuel in my constituency is 6p or 7p a litre more expensive than in the neighbouring towns of Bury and Bolton. I became absolutely fed up with that, so I wrote to the major supermarkets to ask why there is such a difference. Apparently, for people who live in rural isolated areas such as Rossendale and Darwen, the local supermarket sets the cost of the fuel at the pump. Therefore, in a small geographical area that encompasses my constituency alone, the biggest retailer in my patch—the supermarket—sets the price and is the major supplier.
People in my area say, “Welcome to rip-off Rossendale or dearest Darwen if you want fuel in your car.” That situation cannot be right. It is wrong that supermarkets behave in that way on fuel pricing. I can find out the price of a Tesco pint of milk or a can of beans by going on its website, but it is not prepared to set a tariff for fuel nationally and instead discriminates against rural and isolated areas.
I support the Government’s idea of getting energy suppliers, particularly the utility companies, to write to their customers to offer them the lowest tariff, but supermarkets should offer petrol at the cheapest price to the young, hard-working families in my constituency—they might have to put diesel in a van to go to work or petrol in a small car to take children to school—and not at a price that they know they can get away with just because of location. The major supermarkets have had a monopoly—the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), who is no longer in his place, spoke extremely well on farming and the price of milk in that respect. Anti-competitive practices on fuel are pushing small, independent fuel retailers out of business, which is bad for businesses and for my area.
That extra £5 a week where I live to put fuel in a vehicle to go to work is the difference between people being able to turn the heating on or not, being able to feed their children healthy food or not, or being able to go out and spend money in the economy or not. I hope fuel price setting is part of the Government’s programme to look at the relationship between supermarkets and their suppliers.
The cost of gas and electricity is another major issue raised by all our constituents. Those costs have ballooned beyond anyone’s increase in income over the past few years. They have risen by as much as 20%. We tell people to switch supplier. When people visit me in my patch, they say they will not switch supplier because they are nervous of bill shock. Uniquely, virtually, in a service industry supplying utilities to our houses, it is expected to be self-service. People are asked to read their own electricity meter. People in my advice surgeries have told me that they purposely underestimate how much electricity or gas they have used to help manage their cash flow. That builds up a huge legacy bill. Others simply have underestimations having had their meter readings underestimated over a long period.
Those people are worried about switching, because they know that when they switch they will have to give an up-to-date meter reading and will have a huge legacy bill that they cannot pay. These people, sometimes those on the most expensive tariff, are unable to switch because they cannot pay their historical bill. That is why it is absolutely right that the Queen’s Speech sets out a programme to introduce smart metering. Bglobal, a successful business in my constituency, which I am delighted to see has retained its profitability, does business-to-business smart metering. There is an opportunity for us all to have smart meters in our homes.
Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass). I cannot help but agree with her final remarks, contrasting the conflicting priorities of the Government and the people we represent. I have not yet had any correspondence, phone calls or visits to my surgeries to discuss House of Lords reform, and I look forward to having those conversations, should they arise.
At the moment, we talk much more about local bus services in Darlington, a problem that has been brewing for quite some time. It all started for us in the north-east, particularly in my town, in the 1990s, when bus services were deregulated with a view to creating choice and competition, improving service and getting fares down—I think that was the plan. Let me share with colleagues what happened in Darlington—the experience is not unique to Darlington, but I think the problems were perhaps more pronounced there than anywhere else.
We had gridlock on our streets due to bus wars. Two big bus companies decided to compete for the same routes and both ran free buses around the town in an attempt to get the other company off the road. That did not help consumers and passengers in the town. It did not improve public transport. Instead, it landed us with, in effect, a council tax payer-subsided monopoly on bus services in Darlington, and we have pretty much been stuck in that position ever since. Now, the council is having to make difficult decisions on the subsidy it offers to run some of the routes, but I cannot even find out how much council tax payers are paying to subsidise a route across Darlington. Extraordinarily, I have been told that the information is commercially sensitive. Council tax payers in Darlington are subsidising to the tune of roughly £500,000 a year a company owned by a business in Germany that turns a profit of about £500 million a year, yet we do not know exactly how much we are paying for our bus routes. That is an intolerable situation for my constituents.
That is a big problem for us because, according to Passenger Focus, 34% of residents in my constituency have no access to private transport and are forced to use the bus services. Recently, I was quite stunned to see a London Routemaster bus travelling down one of the main arterial roads into Darlington. It was there because the engines of the new Routemasters are made in Darlington, and they were being tested. However, that sight brought home to me the contrast between the services available to people in major cities such as London, which are excellent, and those available elsewhere, where fares are not regulated, ticketing does not allow use across different services, and routes and timetables are not integrated. Most worrying for me, there are few means short of spending hundreds of thousands of pounds each year on subsidies by which residents and communities, and even councillors and MPs, can influence the routes on offer.
Fares in Darlington have increased by 6.1% in the past year, which is considerably more than inflation. We need to take a look at fares, given that bus users tend to be the young, the elderly and those on low incomes. I would strongly support the creation of a strategic transport infrastructure, or a body similar to Transport for London for the rest of the country, so that the system can be monitored and organised much more effectively.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the reasons why the major increases in fares are so bad is that for many people, they are essentially a tax on work? People need to be able to get to work to obtain employment and to keep their living standards high.
Mrs Chapman
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. It has been made before in the debate, and we need to consider it.
I have constituents who previously needed to use two buses to get to work, at considerable expense and with no cross-ticketing. They were just about able to manage that, but now those bus services have been removed. Somebody who works after 6 o’clock at night, or who lives in one of the surrounding villages, cannot keep their job. I know people in my constituency who are no longer in employment because the bus services have been removed.
It is not just people in work that are affected but people who rely on health services. I am sure we all have stalwart, hard-working councillors in our constituencies, and I have one in particular, Bev Hutchinson, who is relatively newly elected and a fairly formidable woman. She has taken it upon herself to take surveys on buses around the town. She found a constituent, Betty Sowersby, who is 74 and lives on Barmpton lane in Darlington. Betty told The Northern Echo that she was in hospital for a major operation in March and now could not use the bus to get back from her doctor’s surgery, where the doctor checked how her wounds were healing. She said that there were a lot of elderly people like her along her street who could no longer even go and do their shopping independently.
When civil servants and policy people consider bus issues, they too often focus on the problems of getting around London and major cities and do not think enough about the day-to-day problems facing people living in regions such as my own. Those problems exist in rural areas and even in quite large towns such as Darlington, where no integrated structure exists. Local government is not in a position to subsidise bus companies in the way it has in recent years. One could argue that perhaps it should not have been doing that, but that is how the system has been maintained for the past decade. It cannot be maintained like that in the future, so the Government need to give serious thought to how to provide bus services in our regions from now on.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
I am extremely grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for calling me towards the end of the debate. I promised a little variety if I were called. I know that many issues to do with the cost of living have been raised in the course of the debate. In a sense it is hard to narrow them down to one or two, but I wish to refer to a few problems with regard to utility bills, particularly water bills.
We know that we in this country are facing not just some of the toughest global economic times but, as we have highlighted, a very tight fiscal contraction—I nearly said “contradiction”, which might actually be the right term—in the UK economy. Against that backdrop, there is a cost of living crisis. We have heard from many Members of all parties about the rising cost of energy and fuel and the inflation-busting rises in transport fares.
Back in February, I had the opportunity to go to the university of Leeds, where there is a brilliant research centre on water policy. While I was there, I gave a speech in which I talked about the consensus that there has been about the privatised water industry for the past 20 or 25 years. That consensus has stretched across both major parties, customers and companies. It involves a relatively low-risk settlement for investors, with reasonable levels of investment in water infrastructure and rising standards of water quality. Crucially, customer buy-in has also taken hold over the past 20 years or so.
In that speech, I laid out my concern that we risked walking into a perfect storm this year. We have drought conditions, and sadly, there was very little in the Gracious Speech about concrete action on the rising cost of water. While that concern exists there is every chance that, just as the Government and Opposition have rightly targeted energy bills in recent months and years, we will have to take similar action on water as people’s dissatisfaction with the service that they are receiving continues to grow.
Angie Bray
One problem I raised earlier in the debate is that the regulator sets soft targets on plugging leaks. One of the most frustrating things for my constituents is finding themselves paying water bills in a drought while the rain is plummeting down. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is because the leaks are not being plugged that we are still in a drought, and that we need tougher targets?
Gavin Shuker
The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. Ofwat, the industry regulator, lays out tough targets on water companies reducing leakage in some places, but not so tough targets in others. The fundamental problem is that if the cost of water being lost is less than the cost of making the repair, it is not economically viable for water companies to make the repair. That is why we need comprehensive action and a comprehensive water Bill, rather than a draft Bill, in this Session.
Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend see any merit in the idea of alleviating drought conditions in the south of the country with some form of network distribution of water? That should be implemented in order to allow water from Scotland—believe me, we have too much of it—to be transported south in an efficient manner through a national pipeline network.
Gavin Shuker
We are jumping around in water here. My hon. Friend is my new colleague in the shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs team and I am sure hon. Members on both sides of the House would want to welcome him back to the Front Bench. He makes an extremely good point. What is required in the industry to move water from places where it is in good supply to areas where there is less? For me, that is not primarily about building a big pipeline from north to south; it is also means getting interconnectors between different water companies working appropriately. Of course, the carbon cost of that is great.
Mrs Chapman
Does my hon. Friend believe it is easier to move water around than it is to move people? We have plenty of water in the north-east, but we could do with more people and more jobs. If there were a more even distribution of people and jobs, we could save ourselves the job of moving water.
Gavin Shuker
My hon. Friend once again makes a great point, but the key point missed by the lack of action on water in the Queen’s Speech is that we can reduce demand as well as increase supply. There is increasing need in growing areas such as London, the south-east and, for example, Yorkshire, where there could be 1 million new household customers in the market in the next 10 years, but there would be benefits for all if we could increase the number of people in an area without increasing the amount of water used.
Last month—April—water bills increased on average by about 5.7%, which is about £20 per year on the average bill. Ofwat estimates that 2.2 million households spend more than 5% of their disposable income on water. Sadly, the Queen’s Speech promises only the publication of a draft Bill, which shows a Government who refuse to take action.
The Gracious Speech contained a commitment to bring forward only a draft water Bill, which is disappointing because the Government have broken their promise to introduce a comprehensive water Bill in this parliamentary Session to reform the water industry. That means that the much needed reforms—the Opposition agree on what needs to be done—and action to keep bills affordable will be even more delayed, which is a slap in the face for the many families who are struggling to pay their water bills.
There was a flurry of activity in the previous Session to rush through the Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Act 2012. That legislation does nothing to tackle water affordability in the long term. In the short term, it will help households in the south-west to pay their water bills by giving them a direct £50 subsidy, but it is worth noting that without action to tackle affordability in the long term, that £50 will be gobbled up within two years because of the existing increases in that area. The Opposition believe that assistance should be extended to all households who are struggling to pay their bills, which is why I proposed amendments to ensure that water bills remained affordable for all.
As the Opposition know, with the wettest drought on record and hosepipe bans imposed on almost half the country, now, more than ever, we need urgent action to reform the water industry, to ensure that water supply meets demand and to stop the harmful practice of taking water out of the natural environment in places where we cannot afford to do so. It seems, however, that the Government have no sense of urgency. As we know, in politics momentum is everything. Right now, water issues, whether flooding, drought, rising costs for customers or other things, are at the forefront of people’s minds. This is a once-in-a-Parliament opportunity to take action on water.
The impact of climate change means that water resources will become more and more scarce. The recent droughts and floods could be an indication of what is to come. What needs to be done to ensure that water remains affordable for hard-pressed bill payers in the long term? Since the botched privatisation in the early ’90s, water bills have increased year on year. We could take urgent action on abstraction—taking water out of the natural environment—but the Government have promised no legislation until 2015, and they do not propose to complete that process until 2030.
We could also take urgent action on leakage. The problem is that water companies generally repair leaks only if it costs more in lost water not to do so. Ofwat sets targets, but many companies can go years at a time without making a significant reduction in their leakage rates. We need to ensure that the comprehensive water Bill, when it comes, tackles the issue of leakage head on. By 2015—the end of this Parliament—more households will be metered than unmetered, yet there is little evidence of the deep thought required on the matter from the Government.
The further delay confirmed in the Gracious Speech to the comprehensive water Bill is serious not only for those who care about the environment but for people right across Britain struggling to pay their utility bills against the backdrop of the highest unemployment rate for 16 years and the first double-dip recession in 37 years. While the Government continue to delay desperately needed reforms, hard-working families are feeling the pinch and footing the bill.