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Disclosure of State Pension Credit Information (Warm Home Discount) Regulations 2011

I thank noble Lords, as always. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was first in to bat. Funnily enough, Teverson is not a natural terrorist name, I feel. You do not think that with that name—a Cornish name, no doubt—he is going to be immediately arrested at the airport for some data matching. The data-matching issue is very important. There is no great science. Indeed, we have trialled it. We have trialled 340,000 people on the pension credit and, luckily, we hit the jackpot with about 205,000. There is a gap, and it is very important that we follow up the people who we could not access through the matching, but we have made substantial inroads into the number. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has great expertise in this area, particularly on the subject of fuel poverty. We all know that both Governments, particularly our Government, are determined to attack this dreadful feature of our society which is exponentially going off the dial in terms of numbers, despite the best intentions of the previous Government and, indeed, the much better intentions of this Government to try and sort it out. In truth, the House is unified in dealing with this dreadful problem. It is fundamental that we get to grips with it and I know that we will carry it out. As your Lordships will know, we have instructed Professor Hills to carry out a fuel poverty review. It is an independent review and we are looking forward to seeing what suggestions he comes up with. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, asked how we can connect this to energy efficiency measures in some form. Indeed, that joined-up thinking is no doubt the secret of his success. There is an element of joined-up thinking because we can use this data for targeting CERT, which is a temporary measure. It then may become a mechanism which we can make work with the Green Deal, as he rightly says. We have to recognise that the Green Deal is a big picture deal. We are trying to get into millions and millions of homes, not just those in this core group that we are representing, so as the Green Deal evolves we will doubtless be able to work in some joined-up thinking in that regard. However, there is indeed a gap until the Green Deal takes off, once the legislation passes through. Unfortunately, because there have been endless debates on alternative voting and reform of the House of Lords, we have not been able to get the legislation through which we perhaps required.