Clause 5 - Secretary of State to report on building stock
Sustainable and Secure Buildings Bill
11:00 am
Mr Phil Hope (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Corby, Labour/Co-operative)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman: he has put the point well. Amendments Nos. 7 and 8 are technical. Amendment No. 7 moves the proposed requirement in clause 5(2)(e) to the list of matters that the report must deal with in clause 5(2), and alters the wording to accord with that in the Building Act 1984. Amendment No. 8 is consequential on that.
Amendment No. 9 is designed to confine the estimate of the numbers of different types of building in clause 5(3) to an estimate of the number of dwellings in England and Wales. That is the only figure that is readily available without a huge and costly exercise to count other types of building. The Government could not justify such an exercise for the purpose of a report to Parliament.
I shall not go through the details now, except to say that reference was made on Second Reading to the possibility of using the DEFRA stock model to provide a figure for other buildings, which we do not count at all, whether they are sheds, garages, electricity substations or whatever. We considered that possibility further, because I talked about it on Second Reading and in relation to the money resolution, but we decided that it could not provide a figure equivalent to that for dwellings. The model is based on hereditaments, not buildings, and any figure derived from it using a modelling process could not be relied on to provide comparisons with the figure for dwellings in order to perform the task that the hon. Gentleman wants to do, which is to monitor the progress of sustainability in the building stock. That is why we cannot proceed with the proposal, as he acknowledges.
On amendment No. 20, the hon. Gentleman is right that we cannot support the requirement in the Bill, and we know that he has worked hard to try to find an acceptable solution. We see no need for clause 5(4) to (6), as the 2000 Act already requires reports on progress from time to time. I understand that DEFRA has undertaken to produce an annual report covering, at least to some degree, the matters mentioned in clause 5(5). I hope that that is of some comfort to him in realising what we can and cannot do.
Subsections (4) to (6) are also defective because they assume that fuel poverty can be eradicated through energy efficiency measures alone. Most of us recognise that, although that plays an important part, it is not
the only measure required. Fuel poverty is at least as dependent on the income of those living in the home and on fuel prices. It would not make sense to report on only one of those factors. Therefore I hope that subsections (4) to (6) will be removed from the Bill, as per my amendment.