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Fuel Poverty Bill

My hon. Friend has said that this is not a new issue, and he gave some examples from recent years. I first became politically active in 1983, when I joined a political party during the general election that year, and one of the policies of the then SDP/Liberal Alliance—the forerunners of the Liberal Democrats—was a massive programme of home insulation, to cut the fuel bills for those in fuel poverty and create labour-intensive work to get people back into employment to counteract the Thatcher recession. The 18 per cent. of my constituents who live in fuel poverty today cannot understand why, a quarter of a century later, these issues still need to be raised and the Government need to be pushed to take effective action on such a serious issue.