Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question and I will certainly look into that idea, but can I just tell him how many things the Government are doing to support switching, not least our support for collective switching? One of the advantages of collective switching is that it can get even better deals for people than the normal switching we have seen in the past. It can also reach out to the most vulnerable and to the people on the lowest incomes. That is why the only criterion for our competition, Cheaper Energy Together, which this year will see 94 councils involved in collective switching schemes, was that the fuel poor should be involved.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

I do not recognise where the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), got his figures from when he answered the previous question, because under the previous Labour Government 1.75 million people were lifted out of fuel poverty. When next year’s figures come out, which will show what has happened since the general election, does the Secretary of State think that the number of people in fuel poverty will have increased or decreased?

[Mr Davey]

I am grateful for the chance to answer a question on this issue, because the report that my predecessor commissioned from Professor John Hills is a serious report, and I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to read it. It talks about how we measure fuel poverty and shows that some of the statistics we have used in the past have been deeply unhelpful in tackling fuel poverty, not least because they failed to identify the people who were in grinding fuel poverty year in, year out. The proposals put forward by Professor John Hills will ensure that the really poor, who never escape fuel poverty, are identified and that we can give them much greater help. That is the real debate we should be having, not this exchange of statistics that gets us nowhere.