Winter Heating Initiatives

Baroness Worthington Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Worthington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support people who may struggle to keep warm next winter; and whether they are engaging with energy companies about the need to coordinate initiatives, including public information campaigns, (1) to make people’s homes warmer in a safe way, and (2) to reduce their bills.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government will continue to look at ways to work with energy companies to make homes more comfortable and cheaper to run. To help consumers with rising bills, we are doubling the value of the universal energy bill support scheme to £400 and scrapping the requirement to repay it over five years. Our simple energy advice service provides home owners with advice on decarbonising their homes; we plan to move the service to GOV.UK to improve the user experience.

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. I fear that this Government are somewhat distracted and about to expend considerable effort on picking an unproven loser; I am of course referring to the Energy Bill that was published yesterday and its heavy weighting towards carbon capture and storage and hydrogen. These are expensive and inefficient solutions, and thus will play only a minor role in the transition to a secure, affordable and clean energy system. Energy efficiency and electrifying everything are the clear winners, yet they get scarcely a mention in the 300-plus pages of the Bill. Can the Minister explain what is being done to get energy companies behind delivering these two proven solutions at a pace that will help home owners this winter?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Well, we could spend the whole of this Question Time debating those issues. The noble Baroness makes some good points. I am sure that we will have some extensive discussions on those issues during the passage of the Energy Bill. On energy efficiency, I agree with her, of course. It is no secret that I have been working with energy suppliers to try to put in place additional energy-efficiency measures. We will continue to take those forward.