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Energy Prices

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: actions speak louder than words. The actions going on at the moment mean that the number of people in fuel poverty is going up and there is less support coming forward to help the most vulnerable. We are heading for a car crash when the Warm Front scheme ends and we wait to see whether the green deal will happen in a way that will help people. I shall say a little more about that later, and I am sure my hon. Friends will want to make some points about it in their contributions. Let us talk about helping low-income families with their energy bills. The Secretary of State likes to boast about the warm home discount scheme. He says it is a statutory scheme and that Labour had only voluntary agreements—never mind that those voluntary agreements secured £375 million to help almost 1.6 million households with their energy bills over three years. What the Secretary of State forgets to say is that the present scheme exists only because Labour legislated for it when we were in office. When the present Government decided to take it on, we warned that, on the basis of their plans, they could exclude hundreds of thousands of people from the help that they needed. In Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) said"““there are concerns about the make-up of the broader group and the discretion given to energy companies to fund it.””" She asked for assurances"““that the Government will evaluate how effective the discretionary nature of the broader group will be and, if necessary, take steps to expand the core group if households are falling through the gap””.—[Official Report, Third Delegated Legislation Committee, 28 March 2011; c. 6.]" The Government did not heed those warnings, and, as research by Save the Children revealed last week, only 3% of families who are eligible for help from the warm home discount scheme will receive the support to which they are entitled this year. The Secretary of State may try to tell us that more people will be helped as the scheme develops, but those families need help now, not in three or four years' time. This is not about spending more money or adding to customers' bills; it is about standing up to vested interests in the sector, and telling them that they have a responsibility to their customers and to the public. The Government are not only cutting help for people in need, however. They are also hitting families who want to do their bit—who want to do the right thing, to have more control over their energy bills, and to make their homes more energy-efficient. The Government's disastrous and chaotic cuts in the feed-in tariff for solar power will be back in court on Friday. In defence of their plans, Ministers have been forced to resort to ever more outlandish claims about how much it is costing the public. First it was £26 a year, then it was £40, then it was £80. The actual figure—what it is really costing consumers—is just 21p per household per year, compared to average bills in excess of £1,300. What the Government do not seem to understand is that one of the reasons why so many people, especially pensioners, chose to install solar was the fact that it enabled them to control their energy use and cut their bills.