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Energy Prices

I am going to make a bit of progress. The Department of Energy and Climate Change website actually states:"““The Warm Front scheme provides heating and insulation improvements to households on certain income-related benefits””," and it goes on to refer to grants for loft insulation and draught-proofing—I rest my case. Perhaps the Government will also respond to firms, such as those I have met, undertaking cavity wall insulation, which provide a sensible, professional product under the carbon emissions reduction target—CERT—scheme. Some 6 million homes have cavity walls without insulation, and 10 million lofts do not have insulation. That provides enough work for a whole industry to do—work that is good both for the public and for the environment. However, I understand that, under Government proposals, if this work is to be undertaken under the green deal, a full assessment of the property will have to be made—the householder's lifestyle and behaviour will be included in this. The assessment sounds as if it will have to be paid for by the consumer, yet the work that they wish to have done may be blindingly obvious. I hope that the Government will ensure that the public and businesses are still able to improve the energy-efficiency of homes without being forced through a bureaucratic and unnecessarily costly process. With the end of the Warm Front scheme, and of the community energy saving programme and CERT, what will happen to families in fuel poverty, or in hard-to-treat homes, for whom the green deal might not be suitable? The Government's solution is the energy company obligation—ECO—but only a quarter of the money from ECO will help households in fuel poverty; the rest will go to able-to-pay households. So the Government's promise that ECO will do more to tackle fuel poverty than either CERT or the Warm Front scheme just does not stack up. In what way is ECO's £325 million a year for fuel-poor homes greater than last year's Warm Front budget of £370 million or the CERT spending of nearly £600 million on priority groups? We know that as well as coming up with policies, even in these tough times, to help families with spiralling energy bills now, we must also reform the energy industry to secure a new bargain in the future. I have said it before and I am going to say it again: to start with we have to deal with the sheer number and complexity of tariffs on offer. We have 400 tariffs, with about 70 new ones in the past year. They are confusing and unfair, and they must be reformed. At his infamous energy summit in the autumn, the Secretary of State implored people to switch. Perhaps he could tell us today exactly how many people took his advice and switched, and how much they have saved. The problem is not that people are not shopping around enough; the real problem is that there are too many tariffs on offer, that they are too complicated to understand and that even when people do switch, they do not always get a better deal.