Oral Answers to Questions

Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

1. What steps he is taking to help households improve their energy efficiency.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

4. What steps he is taking to help households improve their energy efficiency.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

The thoughts of the House will obviously be elsewhere today, in remembering our late colleague Paul Goggins, on the day of his funeral, and I associate myself and my colleagues with the many tributes that have already been paid across the House.

The coalition is committed to transforming the energy efficiency of Britain’s homes and helping consumers control their energy bills. The green deal and energy company obligation have together improved over a third of a million homes in their first 10 months of operation, but even more importantly we have established the conditions to grow a genuinely economically sustainable energy efficiency market as part of our long-term plan to transform British homes.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

I, like everyone in the House, would like to associate myself with the Minister’s comments about Paul Goggins.

The Minister said last March that he would be having sleepless nights if fewer than 10,000 people signed up for a green deal by the end of 2013: just 1,030 households have signed up. Will he confirm that at this current rate of progress it will take until 2023 for his target to be met?

[Gregory Barker]

The hon. Gentleman is right. We anticipated that more green deal finance plans would have been taken out by this stage, but we have seen, and been taken aback by, how popular green deal measures have been. There have now been more than 117,000 green deal assessments, and new research published this morning shows that only 5% of people are not installing green deal measures as a result. If people choose to pay for these measures themselves, that is a good thing. The main thing is that people are installing green deal measures using green deal installers and that the green deal market is off to a good start.