Home Insulation

Debate between Anna Dixon and Gareth Snell

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Anna Dixon]

My hon. Friend makes the point very well, and I absolutely agree that poor housing is part of a public health emergency. Young and old alike suffer from cold and damp homes. At the extreme, cold homes kill. It has been estimated that they contributed to 5,000 excess winter deaths among older people in 2022-23. For me, that figure is shocking and unacceptable.

Poor-quality housing affects people differently. The Centre for Ageing Better and the Fabian Society recently published research showing that as many as 80% of owner-occupiers aged over 55 live in poor-quality homes.

I probably should have drawn attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests in that I am co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on housing and care for older people. I support the proposals put forward in the “Forward Planning” report. One that is relevant to today’s debate is the suggestion that older homeowners could receive loan guarantees for improvements through the national wealth fund. That would reduce the cost of borrowing for those who want to use it to pay for improvements, as well as crowding in private investment.

There are significant inequalities. According to the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, 3.2 million of those in fuel poverty are pensioner households, with 964,000 pensioner households in deep fuel poverty. People on low incomes are also at greater risk of fuel poverty, as are renters and households with children, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Rusholme (Afzal Khan) mentioned. The cost of poor quality housing is colossal; it affects the health and wealth of individuals and the prosperity of the country, and it exacerbates existing inequalities.

There are also inequalities between north and south. In the north of England 41% of homes were built before 1944, 1.47 million homes are considered non-decent and £1 in almost every £4 spent on household heating is being lost due to poor insulation. The cost to the NHS of those non-decent housing conditions is estimated at £588 million per year, in addition to the societal cost of £7.77 billion, according to the Northern Health Science Alliance.

In response to this crisis we see really strong, innovative local efforts. I pay tribute to the charity Groundwork, which provides a “warm homes healthy people” scheme across the Bradford district, including in my Shipley constituency. It installs energy efficient measures, including insulation, and offers support and advice on energy bills.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. While she is looking at good local organisations, let me say that National Energy Action has often said that Stoke-on-Trent ranks first in the country for fuel poverty, but we are very lucky to have Fiona Miller and her team at Beat the Cold, who for 25 years have helped lead the fuel poverty action group in Stoke-on-Trent. They work with a whole variety of organisations to help homeowners and renters look at small local actions that they can take to increase insulation and reduce their bills. Will my hon. Friend join me in encouraging the Minister to tell us what more he and the Department can do to help organisations on the ground today with those small acts that bring down bills before the big roll-out of energy insulation?

[Anna Dixon]

I commend the work of local organisations such as Beat the Cold and the charity Groundwork. I also hope that the Minister will say how he can help support those efforts locally.

Another local project that I would like to pay tribute to is Saltaire Retrofit Reimagined. It is a community-led home retrofit initiative supported by the UK shared prosperity fund, as well as the Footwork Trust and the Shipley area committee. It has focused on improving heating and energy efficiency in our beautiful listed heritage properties within the Saltaire world heritage site. The project engaged with homeowners, tenants and landlords to understand their perspectives on what effective energy and insulation retrofit should look like. Based on that, the team developed bespoke, heritage-sensitive guidance for upgrading listed homes that were originally built in the 1850s and 1860s, and which are some of the most challenging properties to retrofit. The blueprint and toolkit that it has produced removes both time and cost involved for individual homes to get surveys, and provides confidence that they will get planning permission to retrofit their listed homes. Its work is inspiring and supports our national goals to reduce energy and achieve net zero. I invite the Minister to visit Shipley and Saltaire and see at first hand the great work that it is undertaking—it is a national exemplar of heritage retrofit for homes.

Given the clear evidence of harm caused by poor-quality housing, it is concerning that under the previous Government, we saw measures under the energy efficiency obligation plummet from around 80,000 per month in early 2014 to less than 20,000 from mid-2016 to 2020. The Conservatives significantly reduced the rate of energy efficiency installations. Meanwhile, energy bills rocketed. Between 2020 and 2024, UK-based energy companies made a profit of £420 billion. I am proud that Labour not only proposed imposing a windfall tax on oil and gas companies in opposition, but increased it when in Government in 2024. We should adopt the polluter pays principle and ensure that we continue to tax excess profits. I greatly welcome the Government’s warm homes plan, a £13.2 billion commitment designed to improve home energy efficiency, tackle fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions.

Whistleblowing Protections

Debate between Anna Dixon and Gareth Snell

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered protections for whistleblowing.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for today’s debate, Sir Mark. This week is Whistleblower Awareness Week, so it is a very timely debate, and one that is long overdue. For as long as there has been misconduct in public activity, there have been brave individuals willing to put their head above the parapet and highlight a problem. There have been brave individuals who have sought to shine a light on the dark recesses of corruption, and those who have said, “Up with this I will not put.”

We would normally think of those people as whistleblowers. We would think of them as being protected in some way, because we talk about protection for whistleblowers as if it is some sort of universal activity. It has, however, been shown to me, as somebody who is relatively new to the world of whistleblowing, that depending on how someone blows the whistle, on their relationship with the organisation about which they are highlighting a problem, and on the way in which they disclose that information, they could or could not be a whistleblower. I shall focus on that today. I shall also talk about the positive steps that the new Government have already committed to, and where I think there is an opportunity for further development of protections for whistleblowing. I will talk about a solution to some of the problems, which I know that people who are interested in the subject are particularly concerned about.

Over the last couple of decades, we have witnessed many problems, challenges and scandals. Those that are timely and pertinent today include the Horizon Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal, the tragedy of Grenfell, and the scandal of personal protective equipment NHS contracts and public waste. We often talk about whistleblowing after the event, after somebody has said, “This is a problem and we should do something about it.” The problem that leaves is that the damage is already done. We then have to say to those people that although they are doing the right thing, it could come at considerable personal cost and detriment to their character and standing. Ultimately, because of the way in which the current law is written, it could be boiled down to a dispute that ends up in an employment tribunal focusing on the relationship between the whistleblower and the organisation they are highlighting concern about, rather than the act that they were raising concern about in the first place. That leaves a whole series of problems that we need to address. I think there is a way of doing that through new laws, which I will talk about slightly later on in my remarks.

Like many of my colleagues here this afternoon, I come from a trade union background. Too often, whistleblowers end up in a situation akin to the blacklisting of trade union officials. People are willing to stand up and say the right thing, but then find themselves penalised within their sector and get labelled as the bad apple, the troublemaker or the person who has all too often tried to agitate and cause concern, when they are simply seeking to highlight something that is bad and wrong. That puts them at great risk, because the question then becomes, “Do I speak up?” Do they speak up about the bad thing that they see happening? Do they draw attention to misconduct or dereliction of public duty, or do they quietly get along with their job and life and keep their head down? The existing protections for whistleblowers do not give people the confidence to stand up and make that declaration, because of fear for their livelihood, job prospects, career and family. It is often a case of David versus Goliath, where an individual has bravely put their head above the parapet and said, “This is a problem.” Suddenly, the entire resources of large organisations are brought to bear against them.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) on obtaining this important debate on whistleblowing, under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I know from speaking recently to a couple of constituents who are whistleblowers that part of the fear of speaking up, which my hon. Friend rightly highlights, is the imbalance of power between public institutions and the individual whistleblower.

The costs, as my hon. Friend said, are heavy on the individual. They can obviously be emotional, due to the stress of these processes. They can also be financial, when the individual tries to maintain their reputation against the full force of public institutions defending themselves and taking the matter through the courts. Those institutions have full access to public funds, which costs the taxpayer a lot.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Prime Minister’s promise of a duty of candour could be a step forward in changing that imbalance of power between public institutions and whistleblowers? Hopefully, in time, if the public sector takes that duty of candour seriously, we can reduce the need for whistleblowers to call things out.