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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I am loth to mention football, given Burnley’s current position, but I am sure that that will improve. National money is being invested in the regeneration of some of what must be termed our outdated stock of terraced housing. All our secondary schools are being rebuilt under the ““building schools for the future”” programme. The public sector in its various guises, through the regional development agency, the Higher Education Funding Council and the Learning and Skills Council, is putting together an exciting project for a university in Burnley town centre that will specialise in advanced manufacturing, building on our experience and skills base. I am sure that Members will be intrigued to learn that phase 5 of the development of Burnley General hospital, which has involved capital investment, is opening today. I am only sorry that I cannot be there. I have talked about the national macro-economic situation and the dramatic way in which it has tunnelled into one of the poorest parts of the country, in terms of both direct transfers and individual opportunities for my constituents. The Budget will be good news for them. The 5,000 or so who are pensioners will benefit from the increase in pension credit and the tax-free allowance, while working people will benefit from the £1 billion being spent to raise the value of working tax credit. Families will benefit hugely from the increase in child benefit. I want to say something about the environmental measures in the Budget. My constituency contains more terraced housing, and more people eligible for the warm front scheme, than any other constituency. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans)—my neighbour—nods. The Warm Front scheme is providing precisely the type of energy efficiency help, central heating help and similar measures that will reduce fuel poverty. The hon. Gentleman questioned their existence earlier. I can assure him that they do exist, because I see them being implemented throughout my constituency. The Warm Front scheme is a win-win. It is good for our carbon footprint, and it also benefits people on low incomes who will end up spending less on fuel as a result of the Government’s investment. As a result of that and our measures to reduce pensioner poverty, we need no longer deal with the problems with which my predecessor says he had to deal. Elderly people were coming to his surgery and saying, ““I don’t know what to do. I don’t have enough money so I have to choose between heating and eating.”” That used to happen—I am sure that it did not happen only in Burnley—but it no longer happens because of the investment that we have put in. In terms of what we have achieved, that, if nothing else, is something to be incredibly proud of. There has been huge progress on fuel poverty, as has been mentioned. However, in the last year that progress has plateaued—and perhaps has gone slightly backwards—because of the blip in oil prices that translated into astonishing fuel bill costs for everybody, and which hit the poorest the hardest, of course. I want to highlight how some of the measures that the Chancellor announced today will prevent such problems from arising in the future. When people are on a budget they budget their income, and they might do so for every element of their expenditure. Therefore, the last thing they need is a fuel bill that they were not expecting that blows all of that budgeting out of the water. That is fundamentally unempowering, and when that bill comes from a private sector company very little can be done. Of course, we can help in various ways, but volatility fuel bills affects the poor disproportionately. There are various things that we can do immediately to alleviate that, and we have heard about some of them. I am attracted by the solution of smart metering technology, which enables people to realise on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis the value of the energy that they are consuming. Therefore, if there are simple things that people can do that will make an impact, such as turning down the thermostat by 1° or washing clothes at 30° rather than 40°, they will be aware before it is too late that they need to start doing them now. I understand from people who know more about this subject than I do that there is a new generation of smart meters that will not only tell people how much in monetary terms they have already spent, without them having to put 50p pieces and pound coins into the machine or having to buy a card at the newsagent which costs more per therm than any other way of paying for heating. The new generation smart meters can also be used to provide the necessary infrastructure to enable people to sell surplus electricity generated at home back into the grid. It is inevitable that everybody will have such kit in a few years’ time and I urge my Front-Bench colleagues to work with Ofgem to try to find a way to accelerate the roll-out. Let me explain what the Chancellor has, effectively, done today. He has provided a mechanism for the fuel poor to trade their way out of fuel poverty by giving grants for microgeneration and financial instruments that can be used—as I mentioned in my intervention on the hon. Member for Ribble Valley—to invest in the necessary capital equipment that will reduce people’s fuel bills and enable them in time to sell surplus generation back into the grid. That will not require there being huge eyesore wind turbines. I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) is selling any surplus generation back into his local grid—or, indeed, whether he needs to do so. [Interruption.] Just hot air, an hon. Friend says. What I am discussing is theoretically possible. It happens in other parts of the world. I am told that it happens routinely in Germany. However, it need not just apply to wind turbines; it can apply to many other forms of generation, such as solar panels. What better solution can we offer to the less well-off than the following? Instead of just saying, ““We’re using Warm Front to introduce central heating so you don’t have to rely on expensive electric heating””, or ““we’re using Warm Front to put in cavity wall insulation””, we can say, ““We’re also, with a Government-assisted scheme, giving you the means to control your own bills—and, what is more, there is the potential for you to make a small income out of it for yourself.”” I urge colleagues to consider this measure. It works on several levels. It reduces the amount of CO2 emissions that we produce as a country. We could catch up with, and possibly overtake, other European countries in being innovative in this way. It is good for the fuel poor, too, as it reduces their budgets. It will also, of course, provide more jobs in the type of 21st-century advanced manufacturing of the future in which constituencies such as mine have the potential to be involved. I am extremely encouraged by what the Chancellor said about mortgages for capital investment in energy efficiency and working with Ofgem to offer that. I am encouraged that he specifically mentioned the possibility of selling back into the grid. In a few years’ time, such ideas will be regarded as obvious. The past 10 years have confounded standard economic thought. As I said at the outset, if we put more than one economist into a room—perhaps just one would do—we get several different views. However, one point on which future economic historians will be united is that we have seen something spectacular in the past 10 years.