Draft Warm Home Discount (Scotland) Regulations 2022

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 General Committees

[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.