Fuel Poverty

John Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con) [V]]

I support the Government’s aim of making a major reduction in fuel poverty, and I admire the Minister’s enthusiasm for the task and her wish to share with Parliament and to listen to good ideas from across the House.

There are three ways to tackle fuel poverty. The first is to help people have more efficient appliances and warmer homes so that they need to burn less fuel. The second is to cut the price of fuel itself. The third is to help people find better-paid jobs and give them encouragement in ways to boost their income.

We first need to work through the Minister on these plans and projects so that more homes can be upgraded and people do not have to live in damp and cold surroundings. How right she is about that. I ask her to make common cause with me in approaching the Treasury, because now that we are free to choose what to put VAT on and what to take it off, can we please have a Brexit bonus for those in fuel poverty by taking VAT off all those things they need to buy in order to improve their homes? Why are we still charging VAT on insulation materials, boiler controls and a whole range of green products that are necessary to lower a home’s fuel bill and improve its warmth and fitness for purpose? That would not be too big a charge on the Treasury, in terms of lost revenue, but it would be a great win for both the Government’s green strategy and their fuel poverty strategy. A bit dearer would be tackling the price of fuel directly by taking VAT off domestic fuel in its entirety, and that too I would welcome, because I think that fuel is expensive in this country and electricity is becoming very expensive.

I also urge the Minister to look at electricity policy generally. Time was when we had a great three-legged strategy for electrical power. The first leg was that the Government were responsible for ensuring that we could always generate all the electrical power we needed in Britain for ourselves, with a decent margin of spare capacity in case a large power station went down or there was a sudden surge in demand during a very cold winter. We do not seem to have that any more. I urge her to take action as soon as possible to commission the electrical power that we are going to need, because we do not wish to be dependent on unreliable and potentially very expensive foreign sources for import, should we get into difficulties with the amount of power we have available.

The second leg of the strategy was to go for cheap energy, because that is the way to get industrial recovery and revival, and to get more people out of fuel poverty because they can afford domestic fuel. Again, we seem to have dropped that leg. We seem to be opting for rather dearer fuel. We used to believe that the fuel supplied should always be the cheapest, whereas now, for various reasons, we often opt for a dearer way of producing electricity, or we opt for an apparently cheaper way but we need a lot of back-up capacity because renewables can be interrupted. We need to look at the charging mechanism and try to ensure that, with our overall new mix of energy, we can get cheaper power.

Then of course we also always had green imperatives, which are very necessary, and it is particularly important that clean air is central to the whole ambition, and that wherever we are burning fuels, we do everything we can to avoid dust, soot and particles emerging into the atmosphere, because they are not pleasant for any of us.

Boosting personal incomes is probably too wide a subject for the limited time of this debate, but let me just say that levelling up must be about encouraging people to go on their own personal journeys. It must be about making available the educational opportunities, training opportunities and promotion opportunities, within public bodies and throughout the private sector. It must be about working with people so that they see that if they are low paid today, they have a reasonable prospect of being better paid tomorrow.

Cheap energy can underpin all of that, because if we went for more cheaper energy, supplied domestically, we would have a bigger industrial base, because energy is often a much bigger cost than labour in a modern, fully-automated factory. That would create more better paid jobs to go alongside the factory; I am thinking of all the things that need to be done to design, market and sell on the products that the largely automated factory can produce. So please, Minister, let us make common cause with the Treasury, do more at home and create more better paid jobs at home. Let us understand the role, in all our ambitions, of having enough electrical capacity producing cheap power here.