(3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberWe are speaking to all the devolved Administrations. We are constantly engaging with them, including in our inter-ministerial group. On this specific issue of home upgrades and how we drive up standards, we are working with the Scottish, the Welsh and the Northern Ireland Administrations.
Home insulation delivers warm homes and lower bills. I have visited Government-backed schemes across the country and seen their impact on households and consumers, but we also know that there are too many examples of homes not being upgraded to the required standard. We are not happy or comfortable with that. We are committed to overhauling system so that when people have home upgrades, they can be confident that they will be of the highest standard and that, if things go wrong, they will have redress so that we can take them on this journey with us.
Further to the questions raised by the hon. Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) and several other hon. Members, I, too, have picked up numerous cases in my constituency of Government-sponsored defective home insulation work and of extortionate, poor-quality and defective work of unscrupulous cowboy contractors who masquerade as operating under Government schemes. This includes Mrs King in Helston in my constituency who has paid out £19,000 to have insulation installed and then removed. I am pleased with the Minister’s response, but surely the Government need to do more to give householders confidence that these projects are both cost-effective and provide proper redress.
The hon. Gentleman is right: it is just not good enough for any householder to get a home upgrade that is not up to standard. I am sorry to hear about the example of Mrs King. We are working with Members across the House on supporting a number of individual cases. If it is a Government-backed scheme that is at fault, mechanisms are in place for the work to be remediated at low cost. But, at the end of the day, we have acknowledged that the system requires root and branch reform so that when consumers opt for upgrades they can have the confidence of knowing that they will deliver what we are saying: warm homes that are cheaper to run.
(4 months ago)
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The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. My point is that Cornwall has some catching up to do with other parts of the country, but I am aware that other parts of the UK are in the same situation.
The Secretaries of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and for the Department for Business and Trade visited my constituency and that of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon), earlier this year, and met businesses with solutions in the marine, geo, tidal and wind spheres. The breadth of the innovation in Cornwall is huge. However, the sector needs investment along with the ambition and determination, and a long-term strategy from Government to make that vision a reality.
Under the previous Government, there was a de facto ban on onshore wind. Of planning applications for onshore wind turbines over 150 kW in Cornwall since January 2015, only one was successful in planning and has since become operational. I am very pleased that one of the first things this Government did was to end that ban on onshore wind. Community energy projects did not receive much support from the previous Government either. The rural community energy fund was only open from 2019 to 2022, and there were no new funding sources for urban community energy projects after that, except from local government.
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way and for the case she is making today. I fully endorse everything she has said. She mentioned the previous Government’s effective ban on onshore wind: does she agree that the Conservative Government also scrapped sustainable homes regulations and other regulations, setting us back many years? We have a lot of time to make up. In Cornwall especially, there is significant enthusiasm to accelerate the pace so that we can become the green peninsula and be recognised for that throughout the UK.
I thank the hon. Member. That is true particularly around standards on homes, where our local solutions for ground source heating could have been made more of in the past and have obviously now been delayed for that reason.
The feed-in tariffs introduced by the previous Labour Government were reduced several times by the last Government and then finally ended in 2019. Despite that, the community energy sector is resilient and has continued to grow. In my constituency, Ladock won the low carbon communities challenge, and Low Carbon Ladock was given £500,000 under one of the last Governments, which it invested in solar panels on homes, biomass boilers, and ground-source and air-source heat systems. It has been able to put the profits into things for the community, such as safer school crossings, playing fields and more renewables.
The current state of play in Cornwall is that there are 104 wind turbines, 88 solar projects and two operational geothermal sites. Twenty-two projects have been granted planning permission in 2023-24 to date, including one geothermal, one onshore wind, eight battery and 12 solar photovoltaic projects. A further 22 projects have submitted planning applications in 2023-24, three of which are geothermal, four onshore wind, six battery and nine solar.