Energy Bill [HL]

I support this amendment, which I realise in nature is probing. One of the major reasons why we have an inadequate housing stock in the United Kingdom is that the incoming Government of 1951, charged with the ambition of building 300,000 houses, sought to achieve that by reducing housing standards. That was the way in which Harold Macmillan, as Housing Minister, achieved his obligation. It is as a result of that we have so many substandard houses in comparison with our European counterparts. In that fantastic period in the 1950s and early 1960s, when hundreds of thousands of houses were built every year, properties were more often than not built to standards which were less than desirable in terms of what could have been achieved. They were not bad but they could have been a lot better, and if they had been we probably would not have half of the problems we have today. It is useful, however, to give the Government an opportunity to make quite clear that they are signed up and prepared to take the appropriate steps to achieve the 2016 target. The kind of pragmatic and flexible approach suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, in respect of different forms of heating and the combination of different forms of accommodation, is an appropriate way in. We do not want to be overprescriptive, but there are areas where we have to be prescriptive—not only prescriptive but prescriptive in a fairly tight, legalistic way. These regulations tend to be a mixture of the consultative processes which are implicit in secondary legislation. They can afford that degree of flexibility. As in this decade we address the challenges of climate change and the environment, in some respects we are parallel to the post-war reconstruction challenges which were being addressed in the 1950s. I would like to think that this Conservative-led Government will not make the kind of mistakes made by the Churchill Administration, under the responsibility of Harold Macmillan as Housing Minister, in the early 1950s. I would like to think the Government could clearly and explicitly embrace the desirable environmental objectives set out by the previous Government and which appear to be supported by the Liberal part of this coalition.