My Lords, I beg the indulgence of the House first to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for what she said on caller identification. I was not able to speak at that point, but we are delighted with the movement there.
I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, for focusing attention in a Bill, as has been mentioned, on consumer rights on the basic right to have an invoice on paper and to be able to pay by cheque for utilities without having to pay for the privilege—it ought to be a right, not a privilege. We need to keep at the centre of our debates those customers who still want paper bills for their electricity, their gas and their water, particularly, as others have mentioned, those with no internet access or, indeed, no printers.
As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, and others have said, the digital exclusion affects some of the most vulnerable in society. More than a third of the digitally excluded are social housing tenants. Seventeen per cent of people earning less than £20,000 have never used the internet, compared with just 2% of those earning £40,000. Moreover, 44% of people without basic digital skills are on low wages or are unemployed. Added to that, 33% of registered disabled people have never used the internet. That is the group that we are talking about, in addition to the elderly.
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This is an issue of fairness. Preparing for the debate this morning, I read in the newspaper—as I suppose everyone like me did—that the head of one energy company is about to be paid £14 million a year. I found it slightly hard to think of all those rather low-paid consumers whose money was going to that extravagance. It is not as if the energy companies are on their uppers. Ofgem forecasts that the profit margins for the big six will be about 8% of each of our bills—that is the profit, not their costs. Indeed, Ofgem has warned that consumers need an explanation from suppliers of why, when costs are falling, they are not seeing cuts in energy prices.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, that that is the real cost-of-living issue, not the cost of a bill. The annual Fuel Poverty Statistics Report shows that the fuel poverty gap—the difference between people’s bills and what they can afford—has grown to £480. More
than 2 million households in England are defined as being in fuel poverty. These are the ones to which we will also add the cost of a bill, if they want to pay in that way. They are also exactly the people who have to budget most carefully with their utility bills, deciding which one is going to be on top and in which order they are going to pay. They are also the ones most likely to want to pay by cheque, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth.
Given that the big six supply 92% of homes, there is a lack of competition. You cannot shop around, even for the supplier, let alone for who is going to charge you or not charge you for a bill. I think that the House knows that we have promised that, if we win in May, we will freeze energy bills until January 2017. I would not want anyone getting around that by adding money to the cost of the bill. We also want a tough new energy regulator that could otherwise intervene on exactly these sort of issues and stop energy companies overcharging people in the future.
As has been touched on, we are not talking about just the price of water and energy. This amendment is also about people who have to in some way share bills or responsibility for the bills. They may be flat sharers. They may be, as we heard in Committee, carers or people who are being cared for, who have to pass on their bills for others to pay. It is also about couples divorcing, when, again, there is a lot of splitting bills. It is about the self-employed, who need to put in claims. It is about people away for work or in hospital for a long period who, even if they can normally get online to look after their accounts, cannot on that occasion.
There will be many people in those sorts of situation dealing with bills, but there is also the identity problem, as has been mentioned. Generation Rent reminds us that it is young renters—a different group from the elderly, about whom we have been speaking—who most need printed bills for identity purposes. They need bills especially for landlords, but for many other things as well. They feel discriminated against for having to pay for the privilege of a bill. Indeed, to get a pass to work here you need a utility bill—not for those of us in the House but for any of our staff. If you want to open a bank account or get a parking permit, you need a bill. We think that it was wrong of the Government to get rid of our plans for ID cards, but, as they have gone, the utility bill remains for a lot of people their main source of ID. That is why we think that those who want and need paper bills should have them of right.
We of course favour encouraging people to go digital when they can to save themselves costs and to save paper and trees. As to those consumers who are able to check their expenditure electronically, and as the Government’s research has shown through Better Choices: Better Deals, if they could use price comparison sites more effectively, they could make enormous savings—perhaps as much as £150 million a year. That will drive competition for a lot of people, which is very good. It is why we welcome many of the ideas and intentions behind the midata project to give consumers more access to their information in a portable and accessible format. Indeed, we tabled an amendment in Committee to facilitate that.
We have always argued that people should have the right to receive information about their services in a way that best suits their needs, which ties in with the principle of the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes. Millions of people look carefully at their bank statements and utility bills to check payments in and payments out. Cheques make it easy for people just to put a tick on a bill; later they can throw it away. When you pay an invoice with a cheque, the lovely stubs show you whether and when you have paid it.
It is great that some people can pay electronically. My guess is that they do so for their own convenience rather than for savings. They are likely to be younger and slightly savvier people who have a lot of advantages in life anyway. Do the utility companies have to make life difficult for the rest of us who want paper bills and to use cheques in order to encourage those who can to take up the electronic option? I doubt it. For the moment, we should look at all citizens and ensure that they can receive their utility bills by post and pay them promptly by cheque.