MPs ignore causes of fuel poverty
The House of Commons was debating fuel poverty yesterday, something of a hot topic (pun intended) given the Labour government’s decision to vastly cut back on winter fuel allowances for the needy.
As with so many of these occasions, we were treated to warmly emotive stories about pensioners fearful of switching on their heating – a genuine concern – and a rigid, cold-hearted determination to avoid discussion of the causes of the problem. Instead, the focus of every speaker was on making tweaks here and there that they hoped alleviate the worst of the symptoms.
The blindness was willful and universal. So Andrew Bowie, the Conservative spokesman, was keen on pension credits and the energy price guarantee schemes and tweaking insulation standards. Alistair Carmichael, the chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (and coincidentally the LibDem MP for Orkney and Shetland), called for an “isles tariff”, while another LibDem, Vicky Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole), wanted “social tariffs”. Both terms are surely just euphemisms for “subsidies please”. Ms Slade was also keen on the state providing poor people with air fryers, which will apparently reduce householders’ energy use. To this observer at least, these feeble attempts to tinker with the symptoms of fuel poverty were, at best, the effusions of limited intellects, and at worse the machinations of deeply cynical ones.
Something like 85% of UK homes are heated with natural gas, so the only serious ways to reduce heating bills will be to use less of it or to obtain it more cheaply. Switching to electricity will make things worse, because, as I have documented elsewhere, heat pumps are more expensive to run than gas boilers, and increasingly so as electricity prices rise.
With gas boilers now delivering very high levels of efficiency, the only significant way of reducing gas usage is to better insulate homes, and this idea was mentioned by several MPs. Mostly, this was in the context of new builds, a relatively uncontroversial idea, beyond nagging concerns about the effects of higher insulation standards on house prices. But once again, a LibDem was prominent in making a more foolish case, with Danny Chambers (Winchester) claiming that “Retrofitting insulation is good not only for people who are struggling and the NHS, but for the environment.” He clearly hasn’t heard how much it costs, but no doubt LibDem MPs are above such mundane concerns.
So if there is little we can do about gas volumes, it is clear that the only promising approach to addressing fuel poverty is to reduce gas prices. Their importance doesn’t appear to have entirely passed the MPs by, because Alastair Carmichael mentioned the issue in making the motion. Nevertheless, that was almost the last time anyone said anything about it. Rather remarkably, the word “price” only appears a further five times in the whole debate, and never in the context of natural gas.
But it was worse than just refusing to look at the only feasible way to bring down energy bills. Many of the MPs wanted to make things worse. Bringing down gas prices means increasing the supply, and in particular replacing relatively expensive LNG with either pipeline imports or – better still – domestic production. But we were treated to Anna Dixon, the Labour MP for Shipley, calling for the chancellor to be congratulated for increasing the windfall tax on gas and oil companies, a measure that will only drive gas prices up. The idea is therefore foolish in the extreme, but not so foolish that yet another LibDem, Angus MacDonald (Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire) didn’t feel obliged to agree with her.
This was a deeply unimpressive performance by all of the MPs on show. I had certainly hoped for better from the Conservatives now that the new leadership is in place. If Ms Badenoch’s party are not going to address the causes of these serious problems now they have a chance to start afresh, they will quickly become irrelevant.