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Warm Home Discount Regulations 2011

Right: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. The mountains heaved in childbirth and what came out was a ridiculous mouse. We had asked for far more clarity on how these fuel poverty households were to be identified and my discussions with the industry then revealed that they were wasting a very great deal of time and money on going from house to house trying to find out who they were. Of course, they got much better at it; they began to recognise—as, indeed, most people’s common sense would say—that there are areas in which you will find a much higher concentration of fuel poverty houses, but they also found that quite a number were not eligible for help because they had already had Warm Front help and this added to the problem. This is nothing new; it has been going on for some time. We have here, as my noble friend has described, two main groups; the core group and the broader group. I very much welcome, because it meets the demands that have been made over the years, Part 1 of Schedule 2 of the order, headed: "““Eligibility criteria: descriptions of persons satisfying Condition 1””" —that is, the core group. Instead of having what had hitherto been either a tiny pensioner group or a fairly indeterminate criterion, we have, in these four sub-paragraphs, descriptions of the kinds of households which should form part of the core group. I very much welcome that; some progress has been made. However, as I think my noble friend Lady Maddock said—we are promised further regulation on data sharing—it is all a question of data sharing and what is legitimate under the general law. Paragraph 4.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum says: "““It is also intended to make further Regulations under section 142 of the Pensions Act 2008 to authorise, and prescribe safeguards in connection with, the sharing of data between electricity suppliers and the Secretary of State. The purpose of the data sharing will be to facilitate the exercise of the Secretary of State’s powers under Part 3 of this instrument””—" these orders, these regulations— "““by enabling the Secretary of State to identify which of a supplier’s customers are recipients of state pension credit””." Is there any advance in this? Are we in any way going beyond the state pension credit households who are going to be identified so that suppliers can know precisely who they have to help? I had thought, to begin with, that this was going to be an extension of the defined criteria, but I think, if I can put it this way, that it is still the same ridiculous mouse, in which case, what is the purpose of the further regulations? What are we to expect from those? I will not quote them but I have figures here of what the industry has been doing under the voluntary scheme introduced by the last Government, which clearly has been very helpful. However, I welcome this tighter scheme which is now coming into operation as a result of these regulations. My noble friend gave the figure of £1.1 million. I have the chart here of how that is going to be made up and how the amounts on the core group and the broader group are going to increase over the next four years. There are much smaller sums of money in the broader group, which is interesting. The legacy spending, as he said, is going down so that the figures broadly balance. Then there is evidence of the figures for the legacy spending cap and the industry initiatives cap, with the total for each year rising from £250 million in 2011-12 to £310 million in 2014-15. Those figures add up to the figure we gave of £1.1 million. This is obviously very helpful but I would like to draw attention to one other thing. I attended the other night a reception to herald an agreement that had been made between EDF Energy and Citizens Advice. Both sides were very enthusiastic about this. The NACAB has a long record of being able to help families and people who are struggling with debt, much of which, particularly in recent years, has arisen as a result of a rise fuel prices. I commend EDF for that initiative of getting together with the NACAB in order to use its expertise. I was struck by the way in which this operation is going to be quite insulated from any marketing by EDF. It is not seeking to use this to benefit its marketing. It is entirely intended to help its poorer customers. I hope that other companies might follow the EDF example. There is no doubt that identifying those households which can benefit from the discount—previously the rebate as we said earlier—has always been one of the big hurdles in making this policy effective. I would welcome it if the Minister can say anything more in his reply as to what other measures the Government may have in mind to try to help companies save their customers money.