Consumer Energy Bills: Government Support

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Christine Jardine (in the Chair)]

I will call Luke Taylor to move the motion, and then I will call the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with prior permission from the Member in charge of the debate and from the Minister. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will be no opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for consumer energy bills.

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairship for the first time, Ms Jardine. This morning, hon. Members may have caught the same package on the breakfast news as I did. It followed Ukrainians on the outskirts of Kyiv who had been without heating for more than two weeks. They have suffered in conditions unthinkable to those of us in modern Britain, with temperatures in some places dropping to minus 20° overnight. The pictures —of children with frozen faces wearing four or five coats, and grandmothers slipping on sheets of ice that had formed on the floors of their apartments—were heartbreaking.

I hope that hon. Members will indulge my making that aside at the start of my remarks; as I watched those scenes, I could not help but feel alarmed at the sense that Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian energy infrastructure mirrors the shockwaves it has wilfully sent across Europe’s traditional energy mix since it first crossed the Ukrainian border nearly four years ago. Those shockwaves were amplified in the UK when they collided with the unstable economic conditions wrought by Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, whose impacts are still rumbling on today.

We are fortunate in this country not to suffer temperatures consistently way below 0°, and especially lucky not to have to contend with that while bombs rain down on our heads. But the reality of the dangers of cold is present everywhere, and our cost of energy crisis is forcing people to live without heating mere miles from where we stand today, in the world’s sixth largest economy.

It is always innocent, ordinary people—from Kyiv to Kilburn and everywhere in between—who suffer because of huge energy price shocks: ordinary people such as the pensioners in my constituency of Sutton and Cheam, who are living in homes that are sealed shut against the winter, their windows “boarded up” with blankets and towels as they try desperately to keep inside what little heat they can afford.

In the Chamber last week, I mentioned an incident in which I knocked on the door of a resident who answered in a coat and scarf—not because she was going out, but because she did not have the heating on inside; it was around 3° or 4° outside. It happened again yesterday, when I was out canvassing in Worcester Park. I have heard from households that now avoid using their ovens, not out of choice but out of fear of what switching them on will do to their finances. Local hospitals prepare for influxes after cold snaps, because the cold weather thickens blood and causes clots and heart attacks in older people. Anyone who has experienced true cold—awful, core-shaking cold—can only dare to imagine what it feels like for children and older people, whose temperature regulation is developing or fading.

The End Fuel Poverty Coalition estimated that 4,950 excess winter deaths in the UK were caused by living in cold homes during that first chaotic winter of 2022-23.

[Afzal Khan (Manchester Rusholme) (Lab)]

Over 6,000 households in my constituency are living in fuel poverty. The warm homes plan will deliver targeted support for those living in fuel-poor households and provide them with the means to upgrade their homes with insulation, solar panels and heat pumps. Does the hon. Member agree that we should prioritise measures that improve energy efficiency and sustainability to cut fuel bills for years to come?

[Luke Taylor]

Absolutely, and I will come on to the package that the Government outlined last week. It was very welcome, but we need to go further on immediate measures.

More than 12 million households are struggling with high energy bills today. It is not just the cold, but what creeps in with it: the damp and mould in children’s lungs and the reliance, for some families, on heating that produces dangerous carbon monoxide, which presents a threat to life and limb. Let us be clear: in parts of Britain where fuel poverty is all too common, we are at risk of letting one generation slip away slowly, sitting lonely in their homes, shivering, while we raise another forever stunted by a cold childhood.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this matter forward; it affects everybody in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. About 39% to 40% of households in Northern Ireland are classed as being in fuel poverty, meaning that they spend more than 10% of their income on energy just to keep their homes warm. Those stats are significantly above historic measures, and many working families do not qualify for Government assistance. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the Government must do more. Does he agree that very little action has been taken to ease pressure on working families, and that more must be done to adjust thresholds so that those families are eligible for support and assistance?

[Luke Taylor]

The hon. Member highlights the gap between families who are eligible for support and those who just cannot quite make ends meet. Clearly, there is a challenge in making any measure completely comprehensive and ensuring that those in need get the support they require.

When Beveridge wrote of his five great evils all those decades ago, he had in mind specifically the kind of poverty that we are talking about here—not just in material terms, but in access to living conditions that make a higher quality of life possible. In the decades since, we have clung to the findings of his report while slowly letting the meaning of those words decay, assuming that things such as freezing to death in one’s own home were evils conquered by the “white heat” of revolution. We were wrong, and squalor, by means of poor housing, insulation and lack of warmth, is back in Britain. It is here, not just in the homes of the poorest and most vulnerable, but all too often in the suburban houses of middle-income families and in urban flats where young people raise kids.

That is to say nothing of parts of rural Britain, where very old, pre-modern insulation in housing is still the norm. For too many families and pensioners I meet, across neighbourhoods, ages and even incomes, this is the single most pressing issue in their lives. We do not need a new Beveridge report to tell us that—not that we are wanting for heartbreaking statistics. We can see it with our own eyes and hear it with our own ears, and we feel it in our bones when we knock on doors in our constituencies, time and again, day in, day out.

When an issue gets to the heart of people’s quality of life in such a huge way, the state has a duty to cut through the roadblocks, take the lead and do something about it quickly. This Government, however, have taken too long to do so. The announcement last week of the warm homes plan is welcome; we Liberal Democrats have been pushing for it for years. Many organisations working in this space, such as the MCS Foundation, are relieved to see it finally outlined.

[Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)]

As somebody who suffers enormously from the cold—as anyone can see from my hands, which are already white—I really appreciate my hon. Friend for bringing this point forward. The warm homes plan is incredibly welcome, but I am worried about the order in which it suggests interventions. The idea that we should be putting solar panels and heat pumps before insulation and air tightness worries me, having spent 25 years in the building industry.

I am also very concerned about the focus on specific technologies rather than on aims. The real solution must be to cut the cost of heating our homes. There are innovative solutions, such as the Luthmore electric boiler, developed by an innovative firm in my own constituency; a gas boiler can be taken out and the Luthmore boiler plugged straight in. However, we risk pandering to those who can afford to put these measures in, while the most vulnerable are left exactly where they are, in damp homes. I assume my hon. Friend agrees with me.

[Luke Taylor]

I wholeheartedly agree. As an engineer by background, I think we need to focus on the outcome and the goal, rather than prejudicing the tool. While air-source heat pumps are suitable in many cases, they rely on air tightness and insulation, which may well be a barrier to quick implementation.

The Liberal Democrats have been calling for a 10-year emergency home upgrade programme, starting with free insulation and heat pumps for those on low incomes.

[Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)]

A constituent of mine was having energy retrofit work carried out by Consumer Energy Solutions under the energy company obligation 4 scheme, which seeks to lower heating costs. That firm has recently gone into administration, and the work will now not be finished. The ECO4 scheme has been extended, but the Government have not clearly committed to introducing better protections for customers. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government urgently need to ensure greater consumer protections against installers’ incompetence and incompletions?

[Luke Taylor]

I agree 100%. Whenever we have novel technologies, there is a rush to fill the space; unfortunately, cowboys may well get there first. The Government have a huge role not only in encouraging quality installation but in protecting against that vacuum being filled by disreputable traders.

On the subject of the home upgrade programme, as with most Liberal Democrat policies we urge the Government to steal it. It would complement and, frankly, complete their own strategy. I invite the Minister to take this opportunity to outline specifically how the delivery of that strategy will work. As we Liberal Democrats have said, without a clear replacement for the ECO programme or future homes standard, we face losing skilled installers and risk long delays for the kind of ambitious programme of insulation that we need. That is not a theoretical loss: homes with lower efficiency standards are actively dangerous to people’s health. We will hold the Government accountable for their legally binding targets, but I encourage them to remember that full disclosure of the practicalities of implementing the strategy would help all of us work harder to tackle fuel poverty.

In fact, the Government should be working more closely with new projects such as the Citigen network, which I recently visited in London, or with local councils such as my own in Sutton, to see how new alternative heat sources are already making a difference to people’s lives. We can and must be more ambitious. We must surely now recognise that the scale of the crisis is so severe that tinkering with infrastructure investment, while useful for the future, does not solve the problem for families shivering and cutting back every single day.

To genuinely rescue people from the cold, we must tackle the real cost of energy now. That is why we need a social tariff to provide targeted energy discounts for vulnerable households, including those on low incomes and in receipt of personal independence payment. That is why the Liberal Democrats have been calling for the renewables obligation levy to be removed from people’s energy bills and instead funded by a proper windfall tax until April 2027—after which the Government should develop a new way of funding RO contracts, implementing Liberal Democrat proposals to move them on to a contracts-for-difference model. That would decouple energy prices from the wholesale gas prices and ensure that ordinary people across the country can benefit from cheap renewable energy.

I am sorry not to see any Reform MPs here, although it is not a surprise; it was written down here in my notes. They deserve to be told once again that net zero does not mean higher energy costs. How we fund our energy transition is a political choice. They are choosing to remain wedded to the very system that has left us so vulnerable and Britons literally freezing to death in their own homes, rather than making sure that the fat cats pay their fair share towards keeping people in this country alive.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

In addition to the absence of Reform MPs, the absence of Conservative MPs is also striking. It was during the Truss-Kwarteng mini-Budget that borrowing was pushed up by £60 billion because of the energy price guarantee that was a consequence of Government dependence on Russian gas. Does my hon. Friend agree that what we need in this country is energy independence, so that we have energy security and can be the custodians of our own destiny?

[Luke Taylor]

I could not agree more: energy security is national security. It sounds like a trite cliché, but it is so absolutely true when we look at the dangers around the world today.

The Minister has heard my arguments and the arguments made by other colleagues who intervened. The Minister will have seen, like the rest of us, the findings of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, published earlier today: that the number of people living in the most extreme form of poverty has reached its highest level since records began. In addition to my other asks this afternoon, I ask the Minister to simply look us in the eye and tell us why, when people are freezing, the Government are not moving faster?