Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, follow that. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, started with what we might call a tricky spin and then we had straight bowling at the wicket from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley.

Anybody who has been around this issue will have heard variations of these points before; they are the obvious points. If you have a scheme that people are not accessing, you might as well not have it.

One of the points I wanted to make was this. With varying savings of 22p and £7.95, it might seem churlish to complain, but are those savings at the cost of guiding people through the benefits? I am thinking of somebody wanting to pick up the phone to be told how to do it properly, especially if this is something that they do not do very often and they are not that confident.

This is a useful tool in the battle against climate change, because it gives people information about how to go on from here. But are we going to make sure that the housing stock changes? To my knowledge, there has been agreement for over 30 years that we have very badly insulated housing in this country. This is no surprise to anybody who has been around this issue; even if you had wanted to avoid knowing it, it would have been very difficult not to have found it out. How are we going to get through that?

A small reduction is lovely—everybody likes that—but are we even going to notice a 22p change and a seven quid change on the fees? What is the cost here? Have we made sure that there will be somebody at the end of a phone line, to chat through the process and make sure people know what they are getting, how it is being used and the benefit? What if you get something wrong online and there is nobody to help you? On such occasions my use of expletives goes through the roof. If you are not used to using the system online or have limited access, things may not happen as they should. How are we going to talk people through it?

I totally endorse the points made about the fact there should be a long-term, reliable strategy to address the long-term problem—that has been here long before any of us were—of badly insulated housing, and that people are wasting money and we are messing up the environment. I thank the Government for what they have been doing and the greater incentive they have brought forward. But there is a long way to go and this is an old problem. I look forward to the answers that the noble Lord gives.