Housing

The Government ought really by now to have learned from what happened last July, when the late issuing of their regulations led to the frustration of the timing of the pilot studies. Like the Irishman, I would not have started from here. It all started to go wrong way back when those regulations were not made available. The moment may have come to answer the earlier intervention from the hon. Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas), who asked about energy performance certificates. If home information packs are, in the words of the Scottish returning officer, to be ““declared void for want of certainty””, it is important not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Energy performance certificates are an extremely useful starting point for raising the awareness of sellers and buyers alike of the energy efficiency of their homes and what they can do about it. By way of practical example and to support the Minister in what she said—in the emollient bit of her speech—I point out that there are 5 million homes in this country with cavity walls but no cavity wall insulation. Most of the owners of those homes are probably in the situation that I was in until last November, when I unveiled, as MPs do, a warm homes project and met at the unveiling a cavity wall installer. Like me, those homeowners probably assumed that the house that they bought had cavity wall insulation, while not knowing for sure. I asked the cavity wall installer, ““Is there a simple way of finding out whether my walls have cavity wall insulation?”” He said, ““Yes, it takes five minutes. Do you want me to pop round?”” He came round, drilled a little hole, looked, let me have a look and said, ““No, you haven’t.”” I have got it now. It cost £250 and it was money well spent. Another 5 million households do not have cavity wall insulation and the EPCs will make that explicit to the owners or the next owners of those properties. We need to make energy use by housing transparent and we need purchasers of new houses to take as much notice of the EPC as they do of a smart kitchen or a wood-strip floor in the lounge.