Q86 Mr. Dave Anderson: In discussions I have had recently with Which? they have serious concerns about the operation of CERT, not least the fact that it is a supplier-led scheme so, therefore, there is an incentive for the suppliers not to be as good as we would want them to be. There is a contradiction between them wanting to make a profit and trying to reduce the use of energy. Do you think CERT has been a success?

Mr Lickorish: I think CERT has been a success in what it has set out to do. It was not a fuel poverty programme. It has had its weaknesses. There is no doubt that far too many low energy lamps were posted to customers, so it is clear from a governance point of view there could have been some improvements to that. It has filled a lot of cavities and it has dealt with an awful lot of lofts, so in terms of a superficial judgement on my part on has it been a success, I think we have done an awful lot that we would not otherwise have done and it has been done cost-effectively. Again, that was in another context and not the context where we are today and, therefore, whatever the extension of CERT is in its final form post-2012 it will need to be part of a much bigger, much more ambitious and better co-ordinated scheme and arrangements than we currently have.

Q87 Mr. Dave Anderson: I could not agree with you more on what you have just said. Is anybody doing any work to make sure that happens?

Mr Lickorish: Certainly there is consultation out at the moment on the extension of CERT. From a Fuel Poverty Advisory Group point of view I can tell you that on the 24th of this month we will be devoting a whole day to that issue as to what happens post-2012 along with bringing a fair trade tariff-type concept into the arena as a further means of managing energy costs for fuel poor going forward.

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Q115 Mr. Dave Anderson: We heard earlier, Minister, that there are between £10 billion and £12 billion of unclaimed benefits in this country, and a £300 difference between what somebody on pre-payment pays and what somebody who is paying their bills via internet and direct debit. Is that not a real issue that has never been grasped properly by this Government and should be?

Mr Kidney: When we talk about one of the three legs of fuel poverty being household income, obviously if there are people being offered benefits and they are not taking them up, then that is affecting their household income, and it is something that we should be determined to do more about. We have done a lot of work on trying to make sure people get the benefits they are entitled to. For example, the pension credit claim now can be done by one simple phone call. The benefit claim is taken over the telephone, the form is filled in and sent to the person just to sign and send back, and when they send it back the form receipt is notified to the local council to get them help with their housing benefit and council tax as well. We have done everything possible to make it as easy as possible. Just to take the scheme that I am responsible for, Warm Front, whenever anybody applies for a Warm Front grant, Eaga, the scheme manager, carries out a benefit entitlement check, if they want it to be done, and even people who might have been turned down because they were not on an eligible benefit, might be found as a result of the check to be entitled to one, so not only do they then get the Warm Front grant, they also get the extra income every week from then on in the benefits that they pick up, so there are measures we do to try to ensure that people take them up. I would urge you as individual Members, you as a Committee, to do everything that you can to help with benefit take-up, but as long as there are some measures that are income related, and they have to be applied for and proof given about the income, there will be this challenge of making sure that everybody we want to help gets the help they are entitled to. You also threw in the measure about pre-payment meters. The statistic you have given I do not recognise as of today but I certainly do recognise it in history. There was a big campaign, and as a backbench MP I was part of it, for something to be done about that, and at last last year something was done about it. Ofgem changed the licence conditions to prevent those excessive and unjustified differences in price between pre-payment meter customers and standard credit and direct debit customers, and as a result, even within a month of that new licence condition coming into effect, the differential for the average customer on a pre-payment meter compared to somebody on standard credit went from a £41 differential in favour of the standard credit customer to a £4 differential in favour of the pre-payment meter customer, so there was a big difference once that licence condition was put in place last autumn.

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Q126 Mr. Dave Anderson: Minister, I am struggling and perhaps I am just too stupid, but information we have heard this morning is that there are four and a half million households at one side of the equation, and £10 or £12 billion of unclaimed benefit at the other. Dividing them, you have somewhere between £2,000 and £2,500 per household in houses sitting there. While we wait for HMRC, DECC, DWP to come up with an idea to get round data protection to talk to people in the private companies about how we help those people, thousands of people are dying, kids are living in conditions that are just not acceptable, people are being a bigger burden on the state through having to go into hospital, things like that. There has got to be a quicker answer than you suggest. Perhaps I am just too stupid, but why do we not just give them all a grant? Because that would not fit the bureaucratic mechanisms that are in place in this place?

Mr Kidney: Certainly if you are in the position to annex another department's budget and give it to me, I would use more money for Warm Front.

Q127 Mr. Dave Anderson: Why do we not do that next month? Why do you not come forward with an emergency Bill next month? We will all support you.

Mr Kidney: I am not the Chancellor who makes the decision about levels of benefits, entitlement to them and makes assumptions about the take-up of them. Clearly, from one year to the next the Chancellor does not store up the underspend and keep it in a pot somewhere so that there is a big sum of money I can now tap into. He moves on to the next financial year. So any decision by the Government to change eligibility in order to free up the money to give it for another purpose is a decision for the Government as a whole, and in particular the Chancellor. As for the sharing of information more widely, I do have to obey the law on data protection and human rights and I cannot work without the permission of Parliament. I could say to all of you, "How did you behave when the Coroners and Justice Bill was going through Parliament? Did you object to that measure that would have allowed me to share data more freely than is possible under the present law?"

Q128 Mr. Dave Anderson: Did you ask us to, Minister?

Mr Kidney: It was in the Bill. It got dropped at Report Stage. I would be happy to come back to Parliament with proposals for wider use of data sharing for the purpose of tackling fuel poverty, and if this Committee is saying you are all in favour of that I would look forward to having the unanimous support of Parliament in getting that legislation onto the statute book.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

The full transcript may be read here.

Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT