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Fuel Poverty Bill

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Janet Anderson). Something does not look quite right; something is beginning to smell fishy about the way in which eaga operates. What causes me concern is that eaga says, "Don't worry; we tender, and we set out a price." That all sounds very good, but what it does not say is that when it originally tendered that price, it was up against other companies. It seems strange that when my constituents get the work done—we are basically talking about one radiator and one boiler—they suddenly face a top-up bill of over £1,000. Nobody can understand why. There have been more and more top-ups, so the original price is different from the price that is being charged to the customer. The fact that eaga gives the work to its own company, Iguana, also leads me to question what is really going on in the system. The company seemed to be a co-operative when it first came about, and now it is on the stock exchange. Who is it working for? I would say that it is working for the shareholders and the directors. Suddenly, those people have come from the energy companies that are causing the problems. They see the process as a gravy train, so they are ripping off not only our constituents, but the Government. That is why there is real concern, and we need to get in there and find out why there are all these complaints, why all these prices are going up so much and why there are so many rip-offs. I find it absurd, because more often than not when people from the company come to check a boiler when someone has applied for a grant, that boiler is suddenly condemned. I might be doing those people an injustice and I believe that we should put safety first, but when that boiler has a nice gas fire on the front of it, in order to ensure that our constituents have to do something about it, they condemn the boiler, switch off the gas and even take the front off the gas fire and take it away. They have no right to do that, but the constituent is left with two options. If they want heating and hot water, they have to have the grant—or to top it up, because that is where the usual charge comes. That is the only way in which they can get the heating back on. They cannot do anything else. What right do those people have to leave behind the pots of a gas fire and a boiler? They do not take it out, renovate it or repair it. This is about the lack of quality of workmanship. If the gas fire front was left on, at least that would be something nice to look at. This is about the way that the company treats people because it has that monopoly. It thinks that it can treat our constituents any way it wants, but it cannot. We need to stand up to it.