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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether public consultations or surveys were undertaken in the former Department for Energy and Climate Change to ascertain whether people trusted and understood the data-sharing element of the Warm Home Discount Scheme in the run-up to implementing that scheme.

The Warm Home Discount consultation, published in December 2011, included questions on data sharing.

Prior to the Warm Home Discount, the Energy Rebate Scheme, which ran for one year, used data-matching (of DWP and energy suppliers’ data) to identify a group of pensioners likely to be vulnerable to fuel poverty, so that their electricity supplier could award a one-off rebate to their electricity bill. This earlier scheme ran for one year.

DWP Social Researchers carried out a small-scale qualitative evaluation of the scheme, involving telephone interviews with customers to investigate reactions to their personal data being used in this way – this includeding issues around privacy, security and data sharing, and the broader concept of data use in Government.

The findings of the research and consultation responses can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-warm-home-discount-scheme