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Fuel Poverty Bill

I am grateful to the Minister for those assurances, but many voices have been warning the Government for a number of years about how a worryingly large percentage of people in a specific category are being denied access to this generally successful and laudable scheme. I am pleased that the Government are taking the issue forward, but I am going to make a number of other constructive criticisms of the fragmented approach taken towards the relief of fuel poverty. I support the Bill because I hope that it will engender a clarity and coherence that we do not yet see in how the Government are taking forward their policy. I shall leave the Warm Front scheme, because the Minister has got the point: there is no doubt that the scheme has a flaw, and Members on both sides of the House have commented on it. I urge the Minister to allow the Bill to go through because it might considerably focus and sharpen attention across the House on that important problem. Let me give the Minister another example of why I say to her that the root-and-branch review is so badly needed and that we have waited for coherence for far too long. Take winter fuel payments; I expect that the Minister also knows what I am going to say about them. Last year, winter fuel payments cost the Government £2.7 billion, yet only 12 per cent. of those to whom the payments were made were in fuel poverty. Why on earth should I, or any relatively affluent Member of the House—who had reached the requisite other qualification, I hasten to add—enjoy the benefit of a winter fuel payment? I am thinking particularly of people on higher-rate tax bands. It makes no sense. One thing that the Government could do quickly—and I urge them to do it—would be to remove winter fuel payments from those on higher tax bands. There would be no injustice in that, and it would free up about £250 million a year. That money could be applied to the very causes that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome is bringing his Bill forward to promote.