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Warm Home Discount Regulations 2011

My Lords, I am grateful as always to the input from my noble friend and those on the Opposition Benches. Again, I would like to thank Opposition Members for giving me some indication of the angle that they were coming from in terms of questions. It is extremely helpful. These are detailed questions which I will seek to address now, but clearly, for some points, it may be useful if we put something in writing at a later stage for clarification; as always, I am happy to make officials available for further clarification. I shall deal first with my noble friend Lady Maddock, who has unrivalled knowledge in this field through her work in the charities sector. She quite rightly asked about the overlap between the groups. I can assure her that we put in place arrangements to allow suppliers to continue to provide benefits to customers, receiving help under the current voluntary agreement through the legacy spending section. The amount of funding available, which I think is the figure that she would like to know in relation to the first scheme, is about £140 million. This would allow that continuation and assistance. What percentage of those pensioners who receive the existing winter fuel allowance will be helped by the scheme? The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, was alluding to this question as well. There are 12 million such pensioners, and in the first year we anticipate that 800,000 people would benefit, which is roughly 6.5 per cent—I say despite my failure at the old-fashioned maths O-Level—and 1.3 million towards the end of the scheme, which is just over 10 per cent. I hope that is a satisfactory figure. My education continues with the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, talking to us in Latin. I am very grateful in this particular instance that he did do a translation—I did do Latin O-Level, but it needs some brushing up. I notice the noble Baroness opposite did not need to have it translated for her.