Business of the House

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

That is a timely question, because the Procedure Committee has just produced a report on “Correcting the record”. Its recommendations are that the obligations on Ministers should be extended to all Members of this House. We take these matters very seriously. It is clear that if incorrect information has been given to the House—I do not know the details of the particular matter the hon. Gentleman raises—the record should be corrected, and in my experience that is what Ministers do.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I recently met a group of residents who live in a new build block that has a heat network. That means that they cannot access the domestic energy market and are not protected by the price cap, which leads to extortionate costs. More than 50% of London’s 200,000 homes supplied by heat networks are social housing, meaning that some of the poorest Londoners have been subject to uncapped bills. May we please have a debate on what can be done to protect those users from the wildly fluctuating energy market?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising this issue. I encourage her to attend the next question session for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is next Tuesday, and raise it there. That Department is also running surgeries because of the complexity of the issues and the casework that hon. Members are dealing with in relation to the energy market and schemes such as the one she outlines. I encourage her to sit down with officials and have that bespoke surgery with them.