Draft Warm Home Discount (Scotland) Regulations 2022
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Energy, Clean Growth and Climate Change (Greg Hands)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Warm Home Discount (Scotland) Regulations 2022.
I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Efford. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.
The draft regulations were laid before the House on 29 June 2022. We have already passed legislation for the warm home discount scheme in England and Wales. The Scottish Government have devolved powers under the Scotland Act 2016 to design and implement a warm home discount in Scotland, while the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy reserves certain powers. Earlier this year, Scottish Ministers requested that the UK Government make provision for a continuation of the scheme in Scotland. In May, the UK Government consulted on such proposals, which were supported by most respondents.
This draft statutory instrument extends and expands the warm home discount scheme in Scotland until March 2026. The scheme will be worth about £49 million per annum in Scotland, an increase of some £13 million. About 280,000 vulnerable Scottish households will receive a rebate, which is 50,000 more than last winter. The apportionment of spending to Scotland—9.4% of the total—is based on the number of domestic gas and electricity meters across Great Britain. The proportion of spending in Scotland will exceed Scotland’s share of the population.
The scheme participation threshold for energy suppliers is lowered to 50,000 domestic consumer customer accounts in 2022-23 and to 1,000 from 2023-24. As requested by Scottish Government Ministers, the scheme will largely be a continuation of what was in place previously.
Under the core group, about 90,000 pensioners in receipt of pension credit guarantee credit will continue to receive their rebate automatically. Under the broader group, about 190,000 low-income and vulnerable households will receive a rebate following an application to their energy supplier.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
I wonder whether the Minister would help me. The explanatory notes state that the
“process requires data matching activities by DWP which can only take place once the instrument is in force and takes several weeks before suppliers can start to provide the rebates.”
This could be a complex process, so has he got an estimate for when the rebates will be applied, please?
Greg Hands
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. This aspect of the scheme is, I believe, unchanged. The experience of the scheme over some years, since its introduction about 10 years ago, has been very satisfactory in that regard. I am not aware of a wide range of problems with that matching exercise leading to a delay in payments. The answer is that the payments will be able to be made from November, at the finishing of the matching exercise, which I do not believe is fundamentally different from previous years.
Each energy supplier’s obligations under the scheme will be set according to their market share in Great Britain to ensure a fair spread of the cost. The Government recognise that there are differences in the proportion of customers that each energy has in the different Great British nations. To make allowance for that, suppliers with few broader group customers in Scotland may transfer up to 100% of their broader group target to industry initiatives, subject to Ofgem’s approval. Such approval will mainly be based on each supplier’s market share in Scotland relative to Great Britain as a whole. Only energy suppliers with a disproportionately low number of Scottish customers are likely to be permitted that flexibility.
Industry initiatives, which are an established part of the scheme going back some years, include provision of energy advice, benefit entitlement checks, financial assistance and energy efficiency measures. The cap on spending will increase to £7 million per annum, broadly proportionate to the spending expected in England and Wales in 2025-26. No caps have been imposed on financial assistance spending. Suppliers whose broader groups are oversubscribed will be able to direct customers to that form of help.
The warm home discount remains a source of critical support for low-income households across Great Britain. This year, it will complement other large-scale support that the Government are providing on energy and the cost of living totalling, to date, £37 billion. The regulations ensure that more help is provided in Scotland for at least the next four winters, and show the UK Government’s commitment to the most vulnerable in Scotland, with both a 36% increase in spending and a 22% increase in the coverage of vulnerable households. I therefore commend the regulations to the Committee.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. As the Minister said, this instrument is about the completion across the nations of the warm home discount. As he also said, it applies to Scotland essentially as an extension of the England and Wales scheme, and I will come to exactly what that extension looks like in a moment. I understand the need for speed in completing the SI, which is why it is proposed to come into force tomorrow, so that warm home discount payments can get to recipients before the winter. In response to an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent, the Minister mentioned that the necessary data can be sorted out by November, which means that those discounts will get to the recipients before winter is seriously upon us, although we do not know what the weather will be like over the next period. Whether November will be mid-winter or mid-summer, we are not quite sure.
The scheme that the Minister has set out is, as I said, essentially a pretty faithful mirror of the England and Wales scheme. He mentioned that the Scottish Government could have designed their own scheme within the overall financial envelope that is available but requested that the UK Government do it. This is, post consultation, the result. The Opposition support not just the SI but the speed with which we need to make progress on it; however, we have a couple of questions about some of the detail of how the scheme will work.
My first question results from the request by the Scottish Government that the scheme be introduced by the UK Government. Can the Minister assure us that the Scottish Government are happy with the outcome of the scheme? The explanatory memorandum, I suspect owing to the speed at which this has to be done, states:
“The Department intends to make a new set of Reconciliation Regulations later this year”—
I assume that “later this year” means November-ish—
“covering both the Warm Home Discount scheme in Scotland and the scheme in England and Wales.”
The fact that reconciliation regulations appear to be necessary later this year sets off some alarm bells in my head, inasmuch as it implies that a number of matters are not at present reconciled, and that some sort of further legislative process is required to reconcile them. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what those non-reconciled elements are and to what extent they may have an impact on the scheme. In other words, are there non-reconciled elements that may get in the way of the efficient operation of the scheme up to the winter and the speed with which we have indicated it should be carried out?
As the Minister said, consultations were properly carried out on this particular proposal. It is true that most people agreed that the arrangements were satisfactorily carried out. However, they noted among other things a number of differences between England, Wales and Scotland in the circumstances the possible recipients of the warm home discount might be in, particularly the considerable difference in fuel poverty between the countries.
The Government effectively disregarded those representations after the consultation. They made no arrangements to change, for example, the relationship between the core scheme and the other parts of the scheme to reflect the difference in fuel poverty. Will the Minister briefly tell us whether that difference was something that the Government considered but disregarded or thought that for the sake of a homogeneous scheme that they were not going to look at? The Minister mentioned that 9.4% of the total goes marginally above what the percentages might have suggested for Scotland. Is that marginal increase in percentage partly due to those differences, or is that just an administrative change that the Government have accommodated?
I am sure the Minister will furnish me will full information on the questions I have raised. Subject to that, we are very happy to see the progress of this SI this morning.
Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)
I want to clarify that the powers to design and set the budget for the warm home discount scheme are reserved to the UK Government. As far as suggestions go, the Scottish Government can make them until they are blue in the face, but if the UK Government say no, then unfortunately that’s that.
To keep it brief, the SNP will support this SI today. We are glad that something is being done, but given that Scotland is due to experience the second highest levels of fuel poverty after Northern Ireland, with roughly 73% of households expected to be in fuel poverty by January next year, it is clear that we need to do an awful lot more. While we welcome the SI, we would love to see the Government build on it and actually make a lot of decisions to benefit people and get them out of this fuel poverty.
Greg Hands
I thank the members of the Committee who have made some fair points in support of the scheme. If I hear it correctly, the scheme has support right the way across the Committee, which is very welcome. Let me deal with some of the points that arose in the debate.
The hon. Member for Southampton, Test always lives up to the name of his constituency, with a set of testing questions. First, are the Scottish Government happy with the proposal? Yes, we have shared and agreed the proposals in the consultation and in this SI. He rightly asked about the reconciliation regulations; I know that he reads these things assiduously, as a good Opposition spokesman should. The reconciliation regulations are being prepared and the process will run to the same timetable as in previous years.
The hon. Gentleman asked why there are differences between England and Wales and Scotland, and I will come back to that in response to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. The warm home discount scheme overall is devolved, but there are reserved aspects within it. The main reason why there are differences is the difference in the databases. The reforms that have been carried out in England and Wales this year, which we debated as part of an SI in the spring, could not be implemented in Scotland in the same way. That is because the Valuation Office Agency holds data on all households in England and Wales but not in Scotland, where the data is held by local assessors. Therefore, we have a fair amount of the overall annual funding for the warm home discount scheme in Scotland and we are implementing a continuation of the current scheme, as specifically requested by Scottish Government Ministers.
The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South is not right to say that the warm home discount scheme is reserved. A couple of aspects of it are reserved, including approving any scheme for Scotland; she is right in that sense. However, I remember the design of the scheme during the negotiation that I did with John Swinney in 2015-16, and the Scotland Act shows that it is clearly a devolved aspect. However, in relation to setting the value of the rebates and setting the supplier participation threshold, because the energy market is essentially a Great Britain-wide market we have to make sure that certain aspects of the scheme have some common characteristics for those who are supplying energy in Scotland, England and Wales. That is why the supplier participation threshold is a reserved aspect.
On fuel poverty, I invite the hon. Lady to have a word with the Scottish Government, because she knows that fuel poverty is devolved. There are different ways of calculating fuel poverty in Scotland. If she has a particular problem with fuel poverty data in Scotland she may be better connected to the Scottish Government than I am, and she may feel better placed to make that representation to the SNP-led Government in Edinburgh.
Mhairi Black
Would the Minister accept that the idea of fuel poverty in Scotland is itself ridiculous, given that Scotland provides more energy for the whole of the UK than anywhere else does?
Greg Hands
The hon. Lady tempts me to go down the road of a wider debate. I am always happy to take on the SNP in any forum, but I point out the big advantages that we have with the Great Britain-wide electricity and energy market: the degree of depth and breadth, not forgetting that a huge amount of our new energy is being supplied not just off the coast of Scotland, but from England and the Celtic sea; our nuclear capabilities; and all of the things that bring a Great Britain-wide approach to energy.
Although energy efficiency measures provide long-term assistance in reducing energy bills—we recently increased the size of the Great Britain-wide energy company obligation scheme to over £1 billion per annum—there remains a clear need for direct financial support now. The Government have implemented the largest expansion of the warm home discount scheme across Great Britain since it began in 2011. In 2021-22, the spending envelope was worth £354 million. In 2022-23, that is rising to £523 million. In Scotland, that will ensure that 280,000 low-income and vulnerable households receive a rebate on their energy bill each winter until at least 2026. The Government remain committed to helping low-income and vulnerable households right across Great Britain with heating their homes. That is demonstrated by the Government’s support of over £37 billion with energy bills and the cost of living this year to date, and today by the extension and expansion of the warm home discount in Scotland. Therefore, I ask that the Committee approve the regulations.
Question put and agreed to.
Draft Chemicals (Health and Safety) Trade and Miscellaneous Amendments Regulations 2022
(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Julie Marson)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Chemicals (Health and Safety) Trade and Miscellaneous Amendments Regulations 2022.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I am conscious that I may not be the Minister that Committee members were expecting, and I congratulate the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith) on her appointment.
This draft statutory instrument was laid before Parliament on 23 June. As part of this Government’s ambitious international trade agenda, the United Kingdom signed a free trade agreement last year with European economic area and European Free Trade Association countries, such as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. The agreement included a chemical annex as part of the technical barriers to trade provisions, which committed both parties to co-operate in the field of chemicals regulation. The draft statutory instrument makes a provision for this chemical annex, so that the Health and Safety Executive can share information on chemicals that it holds, such as individual regulatory substance evaluations and risk assessments with the authorities in those countries.
The SI also allows the UK authorities to use information received from EEA and EFTA countries to help ensure protection in the areas of health and safety, the environment and consumers. The sharing of information will promote greater transparency and understanding of our respective regulatory approaches and of chemicals safety. It will also help to create a greater understanding of the decision-making processes in the UK, which will build trust and confidence with the EEA and EFTA countries, enhancing the robustness of decision making and therefore reduce regulatory costs for UK businesses wishing to place chemical products on the market in EEA and EFTA countries.
The SI also corrects three minor outstanding deficiencies in retained chemicals law relating to leaving the EU, to ensure that the chemicals regime continues to operate effectively and to remove references to the EU in relevant pieces of legislation. There are no policy changes or changes to duties. As the instrument is so technical, I am sure that a brief summary of the changes will be welcomed.
The first of the three retained regulations to be amended is the GB biocidal products regulation, which governs the placing on the market and use of products that contain chemicals that protect humans, animals, materials or articles against harmful organisms such as pests or bacteria. It is in place to ensure that those chemicals are safe for humans, animals and the environment, while improving the functioning of the biocidal products market. The market covers a wide range of products such as wood preservatives, insecticides such as wasp spray and anti-fouling paint to remove barnacles on boats.
Secondly, the GB classification, labelling and packaging of substances and mixtures regulation ensures that the hazardous intrinsic properties of chemicals are properly identified and effectively communicated to those throughout the supply chain, including to the point of use, partly through standardised hazard pictograms and warning phrases associated with specific hazards, such as explosivity, acute toxicity or carcinogenicity.
The third amendment is to the GB prior informed consent regulation, which implements the UK’s obligations under the international Rotterdam convention and requires exports of listed chemicals to be notified to the importing country. For some chemicals, the consent of the importing country must be obtained before export can proceed.
In addition, this SI makes minor technical amendments to several pieces of EU-derived domestic legislation. The provisions for CLP, BPR and PIC, which I have just mentioned, were brought into GB law from EU law. However, during the process, some EU references within the legislation were not removed, so the SI will ensure those references are removed so that CLP, BPR and PIC work as domestic legislation in Great Britain.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
I was not intending to speak, but, just from listening to what the Minister has had to say, does it not occur to her that we, as the authors of the REACH—registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals—regulations in the first instance, have now spent all of this time rewriting things to simply delete references to the EU regulations, and barriers now exist? Has she made any assessment of the cost incurred in trying to make this transition—the cost to businesses in my constituency, who are heavily dependent on engaging with the European Union—and what the fall-off in trade has been? Has any assessment been made?
Julie Marson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. I would just point out that REACH is a completely different issue. That is covered by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. I take his point about the changes that have ensued from the changes in bringing EU law into UK law, but I would emphasise to his question that there are no costs involved in this SI—in these changes to UK businesses. In fact, this is about moving barriers to trade through replicating EU trade agreements with other countries, so it is actually working to remove costs and trade barriers.
Mrs Natalie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
In relation to harmful organisms and the provisions relating to harmful biocides, does the Minister agree that ensuring that we have effective, physical border controls, and good monitoring of the cross-border arrangements, is vital to ensure the safety and security of our country in these matters?
Julie Marson
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. Of course, this is a very important market. Chemicals are important and potentially hazardous products, and it is important that we have the right legislation, and that every part of that process is right to ensure the safety of our countrymen and people throughout Europe and the world, and that is exactly what this is all about.
To finish off, the SI will correct and update references related to “EU Exit” in the Plant Protection Products (Fees and Charges) Regulations 2011 and the Biocidal Products and Chemicals (Appointment of Authorities and Enforcement) Regulations 2013. It will also clarify provisions in the Health and Safety and Nuclear (Fees) Regulations 2021 on fees payable for activities carried out by HSE as the competent authority in relation to biocides.
If the regulations are not made, the UK will be unable to fully meet its obligations under the trade agreement with the EEA and EFTA countries, as HSE would not have the power required to share information on chemicals with the other parties, or to use information received from them under the agreement. The retained chemicals regulations and EU-derived legislation that the instrument amends would continue to operate, as they have done since the end of the EU exit transition period, but the legislation would have contained references to processes and institutions that are no longer relevant for Great Britain.
In conclusion, I would like to reiterate and emphasise that the changes that this SI will make to retained and EU-derived chemicals legislation are minor technical amendments and make no changes to either policies or duties. I hope that colleagues of all parties will join me in supporting the draft regulations, which I commend to the Committee.
The Chair
Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)
Thank you, Dr Huq. It is, of course, a pleasure to serve on this Committee with you in the Chair. That is a common name slip; you are not the first to make it. That name is fairly topical on the international stage.
As was pointed out in the other place earlier this year, and indeed by the Minister today, these are very technical—and admittedly very dry—regulations. In fact, some might argue that they are too dry for this time in the morning. However, I will add that I am impressed with the Government’s organisation today, and the huge show of strength, clearly outlining the importance of the regulations.
The draft regulations might not be overly exciting and will likely not attract much public attention to the Committee, but they are nevertheless of great importance—the points were rightly made by the Minister. The regulations relate to trade in some of the most dangerous substances, so it is important for the Government to get them right following the UK’s departure from the EU and our move away from EU retained law.
I pay tribute to the work of my counterpart in the other place, Baroness Sherlock, and the questions she asked, and I thank the Minister in the other place for her responses. The Minister in Committee today also went through some of the finer technical points, which I will spare the Committee by not repeating—I have them all listed here, but it will serve no purpose to repeat all the technical points the Minister made.
I want to concentrate my remarks on the implications of the draft regulations for the Health and Safety Executive. I have some concerns about the additional burdens that they may place on it. As the Minister knows, since 2010 the Government have overseen a substantial reduction in funding for the HSE. Despite the cuts, it is important that the HSE still has the capacity to ensure the smooth functioning of the information-sharing gateway.
Will the Minister confirm whether the HSE is in place to take up the new, important, additional responsibilities created by the new trade agreements that the UK has just signed? Will she also confirm that no budgetary pressures will force the HSE to take resources away from health and safety inspectors, who have already seen a substantial cut in their numbers over recent years, putting the enforcement of health and safety rules in the workplace out of reach for many and leaving many employers unaccountable?
It is also important that the draft regulations protect the public robustly, here in the UK and in those countries with which the UK has signed trade deals. That was another point that the Minister acknowledged in her speech. The regulations must not place unnecessary burdens, in particular financial ones, on chemical manufacturers or on those using their chemicals. The chemicals industry is one of the UK’s largest and most important industries in the manufacturing sector, employing tens of thousands of people in well-paid, high-skilled jobs, contributing billions of pounds to our economy and investing substantial sums in research and development. Any unnecessary burdens at a time when businesses are unable to afford any more problems would of course be extremely concerning. I think that the whole Committee would accept that point.
The Opposition will not oppose the draft regulations, but I hope that the Minister will address my concerns, which I am sure she will agree are expressed legitimately.
Julie Marson
I thank the hon. Gentleman and everyone who has contributed for their comments.
The hon. Gentleman asked important questions about the HSE. The draft SI empowers the HSE to do what is already planned, being a follow-on from the original transition agreement on leaving the EU. It comes under the retained EU law process, so I am confident that the HSE is not only well set up, funded and prepared to do all this, but welcomes the powers in the SI that clarify and enable it to do what it already wants to do and is doing. As he rightly pointed out, that is part of an important safety and regulatory regime. I give him those assurances. Also, I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to those in the Lords who have already debated the draft SI, in particular Baroness Stedman-Scott for all her work.
To conclude, the draft instrument will give the HSE the power it needs to share regulatory information it holds on chemicals to assist the UK in meeting its obligations on regulatory co-operation contained in the chemical annex. That removes the barrier that was stopping the free trade agreement with the EEA and EFTA countries, which would have been detrimental to the HSE making informed decisions about the chemicals being imported and exported. By also correcting the outstanding deficiencies related to EU exit, we will ensure that retained and EU-derived domestic chemicals legislation continues to operate effectively.
Question put and agreed to.