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Fuel Poverty Bill

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am not sure what the vernacular building material is in his area, but a lot of houses in rural areas in my constituency—I do not want to overstress the rural dimension but it is important—have rubble-built, solid walls with inadequate roofing. I do not know what the conditions are in the borders, but in Somerset they are damp. Cold and damp equals ill. If one is elderly, disabled or trying to bring up a young family, a cold damp home in the middle of winter is not a good place to be. That is the key. What does my Bill do? As Members will see from the text, it requires the Government to introduce a strategy to eliminate fuel poverty by 2016. It does that by means of a basket of measures, including insulation and sustainable energy. Essentially it would require hard-to-heat and energy wasteful houses to be treated in a sustainable way. Therefore, it deals not only with the people who are living in those houses at the moment but with the generations to come. It will have a permanent effect. It introduces as an interim measure, on a statutory basis, social tariffs for the utilities, so that we deal with those people who are waiting for measures to be introduced in an effective way, so that we ease the burden on them and so that perhaps fewer people are cold and unhappy over the coming winters.