18:17 Rebecca Long-Bailey (Labour)

I turn to energy efficiency. A well-insulated home saves households money, makes homes naturally warmer and more pleasant places to live, and cuts energy use, helping to tackle climate change. At least £1 for every £4 spent heating UK homes is wasted due to poor insulation. Improving the energy efficiency of the UK’s housing stock, which is among the oldest and least efficient in Europe, really should be a no-brainer, so how are we currently faring?

According to the Committee on Climate Change, insulation rates have fallen by 90% since 2012. The energy company obligation—known as ECO—which is funded by a levy on bills, is the only remaining domestic energy efficiency delivery mechanism in England. It has also been cut from £1.2 billion a year when it was first introduced in 2013 to £720 million per annum in its second phase, and has been reduced still further to £640 million—effectively a 50% cut. It is therefore no surprise that the Government are off track to meet their targets.

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18:30 James Heappey (Wells) (Con)

Secondly, while the price cap is a useful temporary measure, there is a huge opportunity for market reform in order to take advantage of the very cheap renewable energy that can now be generated, and the flexibility that now exists within the system that can make use of those renewables without the need for quite so much in the way of back-up generation.

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18:34 Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)

On public and community ownership, Local Energy Scotland, the Scottish Government’s arm, is going forward with local energy projects and community and renewable schemes through the community and renewable energy scheme—CARES. However, Ofgem’s consultation seems targeted to hit homes and businesses that generate their own electricity. The aim, it says, is to shift the burden to others; those who use more will pay less, and those who use less will pay more. That disproportionately hits those in areas of high fuel poverty.

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18:45 Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)

The frustration is that many of us know that tackling fuel poverty by investing in energy efficiency could be a real win-win, bringing people’s fuel bills down, tackling climate change and creating jobs. Despite clear evidence of that win-win-win, the funding for energy efficiency in this year’s Budget was zilch. Quite why the Government can find £30 billion to fix potholes and improve roads but not to keep people warm is beyond me.

Many of us had hoped that the Government would use their response to the national infrastructure assessment to make progress on this issue. They did not. Published quietly alongside this year’s Budget, it did not even make reference to the Government’s statutory fuel poverty targets, let alone commit to the additional investment needed to meet them. The impact of the Government’s complacency will be felt long beyond the effects of fuel poverty today. As we know, a few months ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report, saying that we have just 12 years to halve global emissions if there is to be any chance of meeting the 1.5° threshold.

The Committee on Climate Change has repeatedly made it clear that improving energy efficiency through better insulating our homes is crucial to our existing climate targets. We need those policies now, well before the long-term targets of the Climate Change Act 2008 are amended in line with the latest IPCC report and the Paris climate agreement. The withdrawal of incentives has cut home insulation installations to 5% of 2012 levels. That is a shameful failure, and it has to change. We need a massive programme of home insulation if we are to make a meaningful contribution to the global project of protecting our planet and our children’s future. We also need to have not just the big six energy companies, which are profiting from this situation; we should have 60,000 energy companies and more, as they do in Germany. We should have real community energy, not as a “nice to have” but as a genuine, essential measure.

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18:49 Liz Twist (Labour)

Energy costs are currently very high. The default tariff cap might be useful, but it still does not resolve the issue of people not having the facilities or the skill to work their way around the energy supply market for the cheapest deal. According to the Committee on Climate Change, progress on energy consumption has stalled. As we have heard, insulation rates have fallen since 2012. Current resources are not sufficient to meet fuel poverty commitments or wider energy efficiency targets set out in the clean growth strategy.

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