Housing

The hon. Gentleman insists on giving us a history lesson. Let me remind him that the first significant international agreement on combating climate change was signed by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) when he was Environment Secretary. The first world statesman to sound a warning on global climate change was Baroness Thatcher, at the Government Dispatch Box in 1988. We will take no lessons from the Johnny-come-latelies from Staffordshire. There are many fine Members of Parliament in Staffordshire. Some of them, however, need not only a history lesson but an ecology tutorial before they open their mouths again on this subject. The Government are now trying to rush through a few more domestic energy assessors who have passed their test and been accredited. Yesterday, however, I was talking to representatives of the largest HIP provider in Britain, Spicer Haart. They are in despair; they have given up on the Government. They said that"““we have only managed to identify sufficient assessors to cover 40 per cent. of our requirements””." And let us remember that those are people who have not even been accredited; they have only passed their exam. Spicer Haart went on to say that"““given that we have significant managerial and capital resources at our disposal, you can begin to appreciate the scale of the difficulty the industry as a whole has””." With less than four weeks before HIPs went live, there was not a single person qualified and accredited to give out an EPC. How can that be taking climate change seriously? With less than two weeks to go, the biggest provider of home information packs cannot identify enough people to carry out even half its requirements. How can that be taking climate change seriously? If the Government are serious about climate change, why are they not introducing EPCs into the rental and commercial sectors on 1 June? It is because they simply have not laid the necessary foundations, and the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich knows it. This is the Government who say that they favour energy efficient homes, but only last week they were cutting grants to their low carbon building programme, slashing spending on solar energy by 80 per cent. and hacking back support for wind and other renewables by 50 per cent.