Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)(11 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Caroline Flint
I will make a little progress. A great political myth of our age is that there are no alternatives to the choices that the Government have made, but the truth is that if they can find £3 billion for a tax cut for the highest earners in the country—worth on average £107,000 a year for 8,000 people earning more than £1 million a year—they could have found some money to have kept Warm Front going, to have not cut winter fuel payments, or even to have invested in the green deal to keep interest rates down. However, they did not.
If the Minister wants to compare records I would be happy to do so. Time and again we have heard Ministers claim that fuel poverty went up under the previous Labour Government, which is just not true. Let me lay the myth to rest with a few facts.
Caroline Flint
No.
The simplest test of any Government’s record is to compare the number of people in fuel poverty when they left office with the number when they took office.
Caroline Flint
If the hon. Lady would like to listen to some facts she might learn something. Figures published not by Labour but by the Minister’s Department paint a very different picture to the one the Government try to portray. In 1996, the year before Labour entered office, 6.5 million households were in fuel poverty. In 2010, the year we left office, that number had fallen to 4.75 million—nearly 2 million fewer households in fuel poverty. That can be spun however people like, but those are the facts. Under Labour, fuel poverty went down, not up. That happened because of choices we made—choices to introduce winter fuel payments, to invest in energy efficiency through Warm Front and the decent homes programme, and to ensure that all new homes for the future will be energy efficient and zero carbon. We made a choice to invest in our health services, hospitals and communities to protect the ill, the elderly and the poor from the cold—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) asks from the Government Benches what that has to do with it, but as she should know, a good health service helps to prevent cold-related deaths.
Those are policies for which the Labour party fought and argued, often in the face of opposition. They are policies that Conservative Members pretended to support and pledged to protect when they knocked on doors seeking people’s votes, but which they quickly dumped as soon as they agreed to trade with their coalition partners.
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I am coming on to talk about that right now. Looking at the actions we are taking, it is clear that we are helping the poorest and most vulnerable with targeted extra money to help with winter bills. We need to make sure that those who feel the cold most sharply and those who can least afford to pay can put on the heating in the knowledge they will receive extra help to pay for it. For many pensioners, winter fuel payments make a valuable contribution to paying their energy bills. That is why we have protected winter fuel payments in line with the budget set out by Labour. Last year, we made over 12 million payments to over 9 million households at a cost of around £2.6 billion.
We are doing more for the poorest pensioners and for many other vulnerable households through cold weather payments. When the coalition came to office, cold weather payments were at £8.50 a week and had only temporarily been raised to £25. As cold weather payments target the most vulnerable when they need it the most, the coalition decided, despite the tough financial situation, to keep cold weather payments at £25 a week and to make that permanent, investing an extra £50 million a year. About 4.2 million people are currently eligible—older people on pension credit, disabled adults, families with children under five on an income-related benefit. They can now be sure that—year in, year out—if the temperature drops dramatically, they will get help with energy bills. We should be proud of that.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
It is a shame that the shadow Secretary of State took such a combative and shrill tone at the beginning of this important debate, because no one has a handle on caring about their constituents. I was privileged to serve on the Energy Bill Committee in the previous Parliament, and I noticed that the then Government took no measures to tackle the complexity of tariffs or the issue of those who are fuel poor and who use metered fuel, although the Labour party is raising those issues today. I encourage the Minister to keep up his good work, because we do not have money to throw around as the previous Government did. In all the comments from the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), including from a sedentary position, I have yet to hear whether Labour would continue Warm Front in some form after 2016 or introduce another scheme. Perhaps she will enlighten us in the winding-up speeches.
Mrs Main
I will not, because she did not give way to me when she was being particularly vociferous on how good Labour was on fuel poverty.
As I said in a debate on fuel poverty in the previous Parliament, my constituency is usually regarded as an affluent one, but it does have areas of multiple deprivation needs. In 2006, St Albans had 2,400 households in fuel poverty; in 2008, it had 3,500; in 2010, according to the latest figures available, there were even more. A degree of humility about such calculations is, therefore, important. It should also be recognised that in constituencies such as mine, a higher amount of family income is spent on rent and mortgages, so many people feel fuel-poor, whether or not they are technically in fuel poverty. I welcome the fact that under this coalition Government most families will be put on the best tariff that suits them if that is possible.
We have very little time to debate the matter today, but the green deal will be an affordable way of tackling fuel poverty. I believe we would be casual with taxpayers’ money if we simply splashed out the dosh—the right hon. Lady said that it was £50 million, but the correct figure is £30 million, which will be reinvested. The Labour party would have continued the Warm Front deal, which, as Members on both sides of the House have said, was fraught with difficulties. When elderly constituents of mine were told how intrusive the Warm Front deal would be in terms of where the boilers would be located, and how they had to go along with what they were being offered, rather than having it tailored to suit their needs, they backed out of it, and were left with nothing. Rather than imposing something, the green deal gives people choices to tailor a system to suit their household.
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)
My hon. Friend is making a characteristically brilliant speech that succinctly crystallises what many of us had been thinking. She has put her finger on one important point: under the Warm Front scheme, one company was a monopoly provider with the contract for the whole country. Under the ECO and affordable warmth, real competition and consumer choice will be allowed, meaning better value for the bill payer and more choice for the people who have installations in their homes.
Mrs Main
I thank the Minister for that strong clarification. People said to me that they would have liked to take up some of the opportunities offered by Warm Front, but they did not like the installers, who were sometimes rude and ineffective, they did not like being dictated to about how their house would be operated on to make it more efficient, and they did not like a take-it-or-leave-it package without the opportunity to pick and mix. What the Minister refers to is yet another proposal from the coalition Government that is much better for the consumer.
Gregory Barker
My hon. Friend has given practical reasons why hundreds of Members of Parliament on both sides of the House received thousands of complaints about the Warm Front scheme.
Mrs Main
I thank the Minister for that comment. That is why it would be ridiculous just to insist that Warm Front continues and to splash the money about until it is gone. The coalition Government have a forward-thinking plan on how to offer consumers what best suits them, including the best deal on tariffs, and how to help all families, whether or not they are technically in fuel poverty.
I hope that if nothing else comes out of the debate, we agree that we should not waste energy. Whether or not we agree on climate change, wasting energy will be ruinous for people in the future.
Oliver Colvile
There is a tendency for electricity from the national grid to be dissipated because it has to travel so far. We need to ensure that much more is available locally.
Mrs Main
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I hope that he will forgive me if I do not explore the issue he has raised.
I pay tribute to RES in my constituency, which has developed numerous innovative ways of finding renewable energy solutions. I think that we should have a pick-and-mix arrangement—a whole basket of energy solutions. The last Government were in complete denial. When we were debating the Energy Bill, I observed on many occasions that they seemed to have no solutions. The present Government, however, are having to find a way forward.
Rather than making shrill proclamations about our taking everyone to hell in a handcart, the right hon. Member for Don Valley should welcome the fact that we are giving consumers a better choice, and that we have agreed to support the poor and the vulnerable. We work within the Government budget because, in the end, it is taxpayers’ money that is being spent. I think that this Government are forward thinking enough to find the right way forward, and to do what is right for the consumer.