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Energy Regulations (Consumer Prices)

The hon. Gentleman is anticipating not what I am about to say but what I shall say tomorrow in the debate in the main Chamber on competition policy and the protocol attached to the treaty. In passing, the simple answer is that the protocol will, in effect, make the Sarkozy amendments symbolic and not real. However, the hon. Gentleman has touched on a real problem, and I do not want to minimise it. My third question is about fuel poverty and the Government's response to it. The broad problem has often been debated here. We have the problem that a large number of people—currently 4 million, as opposed to 2 million in 2003—are classified as fuel poor on the standard definition of greater than 10 per cent. of income spent on domestic fuel. The problem has been caused by a combination of income, energy prices and housing conditions, and the estimate is that some 420,000 fell into fuel poverty in the past month. Last year, 24,000 excess deaths were attributed to fuel poverty, so it is a major social problem. It is fair to say that when this Government came to power, they initially made considerable strides to deal with the problem—the figure for fuel poor was 4.5 million in 1999—but we have had a recent reversal of fortune. I simply quote what the chairman of the Minister's own quango, the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group, said about the policy on fuel poverty. He gives a rather harsh judgment that it is ““incomprehensible, unjustifiable and shocking””. That is what he told the press over the weekend in discussing the report that his organisation has just published. I want to focus on the practical ways in which the problem might be alleviated, in particular the debate around the social tariff.