Home Insulation — House of Commons, 2018-10-24
Topic: Energy
Claire Louise Perry (Conservative, Centre-right): I am genuinely interested to hear the comments of the hon. Member for Preston (Sir Mark Hendrick) tonight. The points he makes about damp living conditions and the impact that has on people’s health and whether their homes are fit for purpose also apply in my constituency and are of enormous importance I will start by saying that I do not think that what has happened has been good enough. I will also say something that I will repeat at the end of my speech, which is that I am going to instruct one person in my Department to act as the broker and bring together all the people who have played a part in the problem and can also be part of the solution. I hope that that reassures the hon. Gentleman. I am also going to take a moment to set out where the issues the hon. Gentleman raised about this scheme are being addressed fully in the latest iteration of the schemes we are using to help people living in fuel poverty—the ECO3 scheme As the hon. Gentleman will know, the scheme he is referring to in his constituency was the community energy saving programme, or CESP, which was set up by the previous Labour Government. All the shortcomings of that scheme—no guarantee and no list of installers—were a function of the scheme design at that time. That is one reason why that scheme was closed by the coalition Government in 2012, and a number of penalties were issued for companies under that scheme because, as the hon. Gentleman’s constituents well know, it had not delivered what had been required both in terms of the carbon savings and the quality of work Fishwick was then part of this mitigation activity that was undertaken by InterGen. I totally agree that solid wall insulation is not a suitable way to reduce energy consumption in many homes in the country, but that was part of InterGen’s mitigation scheme. As the hon. Gentleman knows only too well—it is one of the reasons why he is a long-standing champion in this place—this issue has been going on for many years. There were problems as a result of those installations. Ofgem then received complaints from 62 households, although I know the complaints pool is much larger. Those were offered remedial work which was delivered by E.ON. But as the hon. Gentleman also knows, there are real concerns about the quality of that work, because, as he said, it is not good enough to rip the cladding off and leave holes in the wall; people expect to have a warm home that can breathe and is fit to live in I understand that E.ON provided some additional funding to carry out the necessary structural work. I am told it carried out full structural surveys, but if the hon. Gentleman is telling me that that was not the case, that is certainly something to investigate further. Some homeowners of course declined to have extra work; there were issues gaining entry and so forth. If full surveys were not carried out, we need to know that, which is why I am keen that we have one point of contact in my Department to get to the truth of the matter Since that work was undertaken in the summer of 2017, more complaints have emerged—over 180. As the hon. Gentleman set out, the installer no longer exists. We are insisting on appropriate guarantees through ECO, but the Fishwick homes, which are a strong failure of the scheme put in place by that Labour Government, did not have any guarantees required from any installer, and the Solid Wall Insulation Guarantee Agency now set up to be a backstop did not exist at the time.