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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend—I think—but I shall come to that subject later, because I shall talk about means-testing. My hon. Friend has fallen into the trap of talking about the elderly and fuel poverty. Most elderly people these days are perfectly capable of looking after themselves. They are well housed and have good incomes, because they have pensions and other assets. They get support. Therefore, simply to say that elderly people may have a problem with heating their homes is a questionable concept. Later I shall come to the individual choices that people, elderly or otherwise, make about their spending priorities within their households. I would want to know about those—or at least I think I would, because this takes us into means-testing which I shall explore in a moment. It takes us into asking legitimate questions of people who claim that they cannot afford their heating bill, about what else are they spending their money on, before we get too worried or rush to help them with a windmill on their roof. We must go through this argument one stage at a time.