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Fuel Poverty (Rural Britain)

I shall not take interventions, because I am very short on time. The green deal will bring in new capital, new finance providers, new installers and local providers. A constant complaint about Warm Front and its provisions is that it has not empowered local suppliers. The green deal will mean that as long as a local provider can deliver the standards, they can do the work. That will even apply to a village supplier if they get the accreditation, which should be simple and easy to do. I hope that we will see many community enterprises and community partnerships working on the green deal. The green deal is fundamentally a pay-as-you-save model. We accept that many of those who live in rural homes and some of the most fuel-poor cannot make the savings to justify the significant investment in building infrastructure that is needed; for example, those who have solid wall houses often fall into that category. That is why we intend radically to reform the supplier obligation. We have started doing that with our carbon emissions reduction target extension, where we have increased the amount that we can direct is spent on insulation; if we take into account DIY, it is now 80%. We have stopped the lunacy of mailing or subsidising light bulbs. The green deal is focused on real insulation efforts. We have increased the super-priority group—made up of pensioners, people with children and those from low-income households—from 10% to 15%, so that it is larger than under the Labour consultation. That is really important, but we want to go further.