Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of fuel poverty in the UK.

We welcome the Annual Fuel Poverty Statistics Report for England, published on Thursday 13 June 2019, which showed that 18,000 fewer households were in fuel poverty in 2017 compared to 2016. We also saw a 4% year-on-year decrease in the average fuel poverty gap between fuel poor and other households.

These statistics show that our policies are working. Continued delivery of energy efficiency measures, the introduction of the National Living Wage in 2016 and the prepayment meter price cap introduced in April 2017 will all have made a contribution. Next year’s projections will capture the impact of the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards in the private rented sector for the first time, as well as the updated Energy Company Obligation, worth £640m per year, which focuses 100% on low income and vulnerable households.