Energy Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his intervention because he has just mentioned what I was about to say. There are three criteria. The first is inadequate homes and house insulation, and that is what we are seeking to tackle with the Green Deal in a very strong initiative. That is why it is fundamental that we link the Green Deal and the ECO but that we are sensible and take a measured approach to how we create the ECO, given that CERT and CESP have largely failed in their endeavour. Secondly, there is the price of energy, which is a separate debate; we will doubtless hit that at various times. This Government are doing everything that we can to deliver energy security. The noble Lord and I would agree that our endeavours to recreate the nuclear industry, which has had no activity for 23 years, and various other endeavours to generate electricity in this country and regenerate our grid system, which has had no investment for many years. Then, of course, there are the genuine poor. That is what the ECO must be targeted at. Every person in this Room feels desperately concerned about the genuine poor and how we get them out of fuel poverty. As such, we have telegraphed that we will lead a review of fuel poverty to see how we can target them. We are doing several other things in the mean time to eradicate fuel poverty. There are winter fuel discounts and we have come up with the warm home discount; we are now looking for a contribution from energy suppliers to ECO. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, rightly asks, in fine Conservative tradition: who will pay for it? What about value for money? That is at the heart of this Government: who will pay for it and how will people provide for it? It is not as though they are not paying for it at the moment. Energy companies are responsible for delivering CERT and CESP and will be responsible for delivering the ECO. It is up to this Government and future Governments to ensure that there is competitiveness in the market so that companies, in selling their products, try to get a competitive price, which will come largely, we hope, from their profits. Similarly, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, reasonably quoted my honourable friend Gregory Barker in the other place. He said that £1 billion would be spent on this. In our analysis that is only an initial figure. You would not expect me to go wider than that in this instance until we have developed this further. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, rightly says that we are reviewing Ofgem. It is right that we are doing so. I will not come to any conclusions on Ofgem yet because the consultation is taking place. It will conclude in March, which is before the autumn, when we start our consultation on the ECO and so will be able to take the findings into account and link them together, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, would expect us to do. Because the result of the Ofgem will be available in March, we hope to be able to take it into account in the passage of this Bill. Noble Lords should be under no illusion. There is a very good document, which we have put in the Library and should explain clearly what we are trying to do in the ECO and every measure in the Green Deal. It is an excellent summary. It must be good because I can understand it. This is to explain what we are doing. Make no mistake: we are not trying to railroad a new policy through.