Fuel Poverty

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy written question – answered at on 1 August 2018.

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Photo of Lord Bird Lord Bird Crossbench

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made, or intend to make, of the report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, Beyond ECO: the future of fuel poverty support, published on 3 July, and its conclusion that they are set to miss their 2030 target of delivering energy efficiency measures for fuel poor households as set out in their report Cutting the cost of keeping warm – a fuel poverty strategy for England (Cm9019), published 3 March 2015, by at least sixty years.

Photo of Lord Henley Lord Henley Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy)

We recently announced that the Energy Company Obligation will be entirely focused on low income households from later in 2018, in a new scheme that will run to 2022. We also committed in the Clean Growth Strategy to extending energy efficiency support from 2022 to 2028 at least at the current level of ECO, bringing the total investment to over £6bn over the next decade. As part of this we will review the best form of support beyond 2022, recognising the need to both save carbon and meet the Government’s commitment to upgrade all fuel poor homes to EPC Band C by 2030. Research such as the July IPPR report provide valuable inputs to decision making around achieving the target. The latest statistics show that there were nearly 800,000 fewer E, F or G rated fuel poor homes in 2016 compared to 2010 and that we had reached 91% of fuel poor homes were rated E or above in line with our 2020 milestone.

The initial focus of our work on fuel poverty has been to improve the least energy efficient homes. We are aware that this focus on the worst homes has meant that we have not yet begun to improve the proportion of fuel poor homes rated C or above and we will be assessing the appropriate policy mix to improve fuel poor homes to that standard over the 2020s.

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