Housing

On occasions, this debate has been fairly rumbustious, largely due to the excellence of the opening speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). However, in the few minutes remaining, I hope that I can take a slightly different approach to the matter. I think that all hon. Members agree that the energy condition reports are good news. There does not seem to be any dispute about that, so can we take it as a given that everyone wants them, and wants the scheme, when it is implemented, to be a success? Like the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), I was a housing Minister. After four years in that job, I can sense when a project is not going to get off the ground. For a number of weeks, I have tabled questions to the Minister for Housing and Planning, asking for details of how many domestic energy assessors and home inspectors there are in each local authority, city and region. Week after week, the response that I got was that the question would be answered ““shortly””. Eventually, I raised the matter with the Leader of the House at last week’s business questions, and at last got something of an answer. However, I was still not given a number. The answer that I received did not disaggregate home inspectors and domestic energy assessors. Instead, it lumped both together, and it gave no breakdown of how many there were per district. The answer did not even disaggregate those who had qualified and those who were still in training. At the end of last week, the best that the Department could do was to say that the total number of inspectors and assessors—both fully trained and still in training—was something approaching 2,000. The answer went on to say that there was no point in giving a breakdown in terms of local authority, city or region because domestic energy assessors will work on a regional basis. The fact that the assessors will have to drive all over a region, thus increasing carbon emissions, is apparently neither here nor there. Not unreasonably, therefore, at the end of last week I tabled a named day question, asking whether the Secretary of State, pursuant to her answer of 8 May, could tell me how many practising domestic energy assessors and home inspectors there are in each region. After all, we are only 15 days away from the implementation of the scheme, so one would have thought that the Department would at least know how many inspectors and assessors there are in each region. What answer did I get to my named day question? I was told that the Secretary of State would answer it ““shortly””. Only two reasonable inference can be drawn from the fact that Ministers cannot tell the House how many domestic energy assessors there are in each region. In fact, an extrapolation from the answer that I got last week shows that there may be only 57 qualified inspectors in the north-east, 76 in Wales and 152 in London. That is pretty pathetic, so either Ministers do know the numbers involved and are too embarrassed to tell the House, or they have no idea. In either case, I suggest that it would be in everyone’s interest to postpone the scheme for three months, until October. I have no idea about the merits of the judicial review being sought by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, but I would be amazed if the single judge who has to make the decision does not give leave for that review to be heard. Moreover, it is fanciful to believe that the High Court could hold a full hearing before 1 June, so that is another layer of uncertainty. Ministers must be able, with confidence, to tell the House, the country and everyone involved that there are enough inspectors and domestic energy assessors in every region. They will be doing themselves—and people who believe in energy conservation and going green—no favours if they sleepwalk into a disaster with this scheme. All they have to do is postpone it for three months until they—and the country—are confident that there are enough inspectors and assessors. If they do not do that, there is every prospect that the scheme will be a disaster.