Energy Bills

David Anderson Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

Ofgem is fit for purpose. It needs to ensure that the returns on network business are fair to enable profits, but not beyond that. That is why it has acted. It has asked the network companies to justify the current investment programmes that they have put to it.

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

Is it not true that we were sold the privatisation of utilities on the supposed knowledge that there was a transfer of risk from the public sector to the private sector? What we have seen today is a transfer of risk from the billed utility customer to the taxpayer, so the same people are paying the same money through a different route while the companies get off scot-free and with a £600 million taxpayer bung.

[Mr Davey]

I do not recognise anything that the hon. Gentleman has just said. If he does not understand the difference between bill payers and tax payers, he needs to ask the fuel poverty lobby groups that are saying that people in his constituency on low incomes will benefit from this change, which moves some of the cost from bills to taxes. He really ought to talk to the fuel poverty lobby groups.

[Mr Anderson]

What about the companies doing their bit?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) is now squawking like a parrot with indigestion. He must calm himself. He is normally a calm man and he aspires to statesmanship.