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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many households (a) overall and (b) broken down by (i) core and (ii) broader group were eligible for the Warm Homes Discount in each of the last ten financial years.

For the 2020/21 scheme year of the Warm Home Discount, around 1 million of the approximately 1.2 million Pension Credit Guarantee Credit (PCGC) recipients received the rebate automatically as a result of data matching between the Department for Work and Pensions and participating energy suppliers. A further 50,000 claimed a rebate through calling the helpline, having been sent a letter from Government requesting that they provide further information. There may be a number of reasons why the remainder did not receive a rebate, and some would not have been eligible, for instance if they were not with a participating energy supplier. The Government do not currently have the data for previous scheme years available.

Under the Broader Group, it is up to each energy supplier to set the eligibility criteria they use to decide which customers receive rebates. The Government sets mandatory Broader Group eligibility criteria, of which the potential eligible pool for 2020/21 is estimated to be around 3.1 million households. However, most energy suppliers expand their eligibility criteria, subject to approval from the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, the scheme administrator. This means that the actual eligible pool was larger, and the eligibility criteria tend to vary between energy suppliers and scheme years. The Government therefore do not have data on the total number of households who would have been eligible for Broader Group rebates in each scheme year.