13:58 The Minister for Climate Change and Industry (Mr Nick Hurd)

The fuel poverty target is certainly ambitious, and I have not heard anyone argue to the contrary. The band C target is set at a level that only 7% of fuel-poor households currently enjoy. We are aiming high, and it is right for us to do so. As the Committee on Climate Change reiterated in its report last week, the target is extremely challenging. However, we must be clear that meeting that challenge may provide huge benefits for households that need support. Improving those E, F or G-rated homes to band D can reduce energy costs by an average of £400. I am pleased to be able to say that although the challenge is significant, progress is being made.

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14:21 Rebecca Long-Bailey (Labour)

I will gently move the hon. Lady back to energy efficiency. She is making a very compelling public health case for the need to tackle energy efficiency and fuel poverty. Does she share my frustration that the national infrastructure assessment is a golden opportunity with respect to putting energy efficiency front and centre in the Government’s low carbon green strategy and industrial strategy? They should do that, because it could help to sort out not only the health crisis, but the climate crisis.

Economic analysis by the well-regarded Frontier Economics suggests that the net present value of investing in insulating homes could be as valuable as the HS2 project. Cambridge Econometrics found that for each pound spent on insulating homes £1.12 is generated for the Treasury and £3 for the economy in GDP, and 42 pence is saved by the NHS. It is clear that investing in insulation has a positive effect not just for those in fuel poverty or for climate change, but for the wider economy. Unfortunately, however, the fact is that if we compare major insulation measures being installed today to 10 years ago under the previous Labour Government, there has been a huge 88% fall. Put another way, the long-term solution to fuel poverty gets 12% of the support that it originally received.

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14:35 Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)

There is the broader point that Scotland is an energy-rich country, whether from fossil fuels or our ability to deliver renewable energy today and in the future. Our unique characteristics as an energy producer should not be trapping our people in fuel poverty. Let us not forget that Westminster has extracted a bounty of £360 billion in taxation receipts from North sea oil since the 1970s. Where is the long-run benefit of this dividend? Why is it that the citizens of an energy-rich country such as Scotland, which has produced a bonanza for the Government, suffer fuel poverty to such an extent? We need to take into account the human cost of this failure to tackle head on the root cause of fuel poverty—high and unfair pricing through the lack of a universal market as one issue.

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15:10 Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)

I had not intended to speak today because I thought this was going to be a packed debate; that was my misjudgment. This is a crucial debate, however, and I want to add a few words. One of the frustrations that many of us feel is that tackling fuel poverty by investing in energy efficiency can really be a win-win situation in getting people’s fuel bills down, tackling climate change and creating jobs. The creation of those jobs has led to the conclusion that by investing in tackling energy efficiency problems we can actually raise more money than we need to invest. That was rightly mentioned by the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey).

I want to mention the Committee on Climate Change, whose report last week made it clear that improving energy efficiency through better insulating our homes is key to meeting our climate targets. In that respect, will the Minister give us an indication of when the severely delayed clean growth plan will be published and whether it will include a comprehensive energy efficiency plan, including a statutory commitment to ensuring that all fuel-poor homes have an energy performance rating of at least C by 2030 at the latest?

Instead of having the big six, we should have 60,000. We should do what Germany is doing and have real community energy, not just as a nice-to-have extra bit of luxury but as the bread and butter of our energy system. If we were to do that, we could really give people more control over energy. We could ensure that the huge energy companies were not siphoning off big profits and that investment was going back into the community. We would need to ensure priority access to the grid for community renewables, and a community right of first use—at wholesale, not retail, prices—of the energy generated. We would also need a planning framework that was able to determine locally the degree of community ownership required as a precondition of permitted development, and a right to acquire or own the local distribution network and to sell long consumption—in other words, demand reduction—alongside demand management and renewable energy. I can also imagine a role for the Green Investment Bank, if it was still properly in our hands rather than being flogged off to Macquarie, as seems likely to happen.

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15:16 Gill Furniss (Labour)

The warm homes discount is an annual payment of £140 to around 2.1 million households to relieve pressure on their energy bills, but it was revealed last year that only 15% of those in receipt of the discount were actually in fuel poverty. The Treasury, then under the new editor of the Evening Standard , said that the system was working, but the scheme’s targeting is a total failure. The Minister for Climate Change and Industry said in a Delegated Legislation Committee last year that the Government would address that through better data-sharing in the Digital Economy Bill, but the Government are yet to explain how they will improve targeting.

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15:28 Jesse Norman (Conservative)

I thank colleagues on both sides of the House for their contributions to this debate. I will respond to some of their many points but, first, I will recap the situation. The most recent statistics, as highlighted by my hon. Friend the Minister for Climate Change and Industry in his opening remarks, show that there were approximately 780,000 fewer homes in the lowest energy efficiency rating bands—E, F and G—in 2014 compared with 2010, which demonstrates real, sustainable progress towards the 2020 and 2025 milestones. It is clear from the statistics that the fuel poverty milestones and target are backloaded and that the scale of improvements required to reach each of the target dates increases over time.

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