Fuel and Energy Provision (Hansard, 17 January 1989)

§ Mr. John Hughes (Coventry, North-East)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the provision of essential fuel and energy to each home; to guarantee appliances; to prevent the entry to premises without prior recorded legally authorised notice; to prevent the unauthorised removal of fuel measuring devices; to abolish standing charges; and for connected purposes. I welcome the opportunity to bring this Bill before the House once again and I make no apology for doing so. Fuel poverty is a vital issue. Any society that likes to think itself civilised should be prepared to provide all its citizens, irrespective of their circumstances or status, with certain basics—food. shelter and warmth—which are the essentials for living.
I appreciate that the House is used to dealing with the most complex subjects and that hon. Members will leave no stone unturned in their endeavour to become well versed in those subjects. Their strong commitment motivates them, at great public expense and without hesitation, to travel to the furthest corners of the globe and to the most exotic places to slake their thirst for knowledge and understanding.
I am pleased to be able to tell the House that the subject of my Bill, important as it is, is a simple matter and that hon. Members can obtain the most comprehensive understanding of the realities of fuel poverty by the simplest expedient at no cost to the public; in fact, it would result in financial savings.
So that hon. Members can understand the extreme cold that their poorest constituents experience, I am sure that they would agree to the heating in the Chamber being turned off and left off for 24 hours or, better still, a week or a month. That would equip the House to understand the meaning of cold—cold which cannot be magicked away by the empty platitudes and publicity campaigns that have characterised the Government's response to the issue. It cannot be magicked away by advice from Ministers with a deranged lack of reality.
The cold to which I refer does not belong on a Christmas card. It cannot be discovered in a momentary immersion in icy water after a massage or a hot sauna. It cannot be experienced when the hand is plunged into an ice bucket to grip the neck of a champagne bottle. The cold to which I refer is a public fact and the responsibility for ensuring that people do not suffer as a result of it rests with the House. That responsibility cannot be privatised. That is why I am prepared to bring this Bill before the House at any and every opportunity, year in and year out, if necessary.
It is necessary to be relentless in pursuing this matter because the cold is a cruel, relentless, remorseless enemy, bringing in its wake misery, illness and death. But those evils are not shared equally in our society. The people who suffer most are the poor, the single-parent families, the unemployed and their families, the disadvantaged, those on low incomes, those who are discriminated against, those who are disabled or ill and, most important, the elderly—the people least able to endure extremes of temperature which would be unacceptable in this House.
Ninety-five per cent. of elderly people live in their own homes. For our elderly citizens, those homes, which were once full of joy, were shared with husbands or wives and 178 resounded to the laughter of children, can, over the course of the years, or even months or days, become prisons where the warder is the cold. The cold regulates the time of going to bed and the time of rising, denies people the energy needed to prepare food, restricts the choice of what they can buy and restricts their ability to answer the door. It shuts them in a cell where their voice cannot be heard and where the world does not choose to look—a cell which can become a coffin.
On bright, clear winter days, when the sun is shining on the windows, illuminating Jack Frost's sparkling handiwork, it is hard to imagine that behind the panes of glass in any town or any village a human being may he freezing to death. Hypothermia is difficult to diagnose and there is evidence that doctors sometimes seem reluctant to put it on the death certificate, so the number of deaths directly attributable to the cold is often understated. For 1981 and 1983 the chief medical statistician found that fewer than three out of every four hypothermia deaths in hospital appeared on death certificates.
However, even if we cannot always rely on the information provided by death certificates to give a clear indicator that cold weather was responsible for any particular death, we can easily get a clear idea of the scale of the overall problem in this country. It is not merely a crisis or an epidemic; it is a disaster. The additional number of winter deaths over the past five years has averaged out at 37,740. It is not enough to sit back and say, "Well, of course, it is inevitable that more old people will die in winter—it is a fact of nature and cannot be avoided." If that is so, why is the problem so much greater in Britain than in other countries? A comparison has shown that, in February, whereas the monthly increase in winter mortalities was 24 per cent. in England and Wales and 19 per cent. in Scotland, the equivalent figure for Sweden—a country of civilised standards, not noted for the warmth of its climate—was 6 per cent.
However, death from hypothermia itself represents only a small proportion of deaths in which the cold is a major contributory factor in the progress of other illnesses. For old people suffering from arthritis, rheumatism, with weak hearts and poor circulation, brittle bones and fragile constitutions, the cold gives those conditions a helping hand. Then there is the will to live and the will to get better. Can anything be more bleak and desolate than huddling in front of a single bar of an electric fire or a single gas radiant in the depth of winter out of mortal dread of the bill that will land on the mat one day?
What about the unemployed? Statistic after statistic has confirmed the link between ill health and unemployment. We know that people who, through no fault of their own, become unemployed are subject to severe depression. For those people, the winter cold is an ever-present qualification of their status. Sadly, Government policies are exacerbating the problems. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing, as the interests of the already wealthy are advanced at the expense of the already poor. The Government have funded tax cuts by selling off industries that belonged to this country. Consequently, the people at the bottom of the economic spectrum—the elderly, the unemployed and the disabled—who have all suffered as a result of recent social security changes must subsidise cut-price bargains for the City and an economic policy that has flooded the country with imports.
When fuel prices are compared with the remaining non-fuel items in the retail prices index, we see that the cost 179 of domestic fuel has risen by 32 per cent. in real terms since 1970 despite the exploitation of oil and gas resources in the North sea. With the privatisation of the electricity industry, the Government will make things even worse for people on low incomes. Electricity prices increased by 9 per cent. last year and are set to go up a further 6 per cent. this April. Taken together, that will mean that the industry will have gained a further £15 billion from household bills. As a consequence, the cost to the consumer is growing faster in Britain than anywhere else and many people, once again in the low-income groups, including single-parent families and elderly people, are doubly disadvantaged. Their homes, poorly insulated and with ill-fitting windows and doors, cannot hold the heat. They cannot afford to install efficient, modern appliances to take advantage of off-peak rates. In other words, they are shut out from the developments in technology. As a result, those people pay higher bills for less warmth. The end result is an increase in the number of disconnections.
With privatisation both because of price increases and because of the policy that private companies will adopt, the number of disconnections will be greater than under nationalisation. There is no doubt about that. In the two years since gas privatisation, gas disconnections have risen by 25 per cent. and National Gas Consumers Council figures show that 62,000 households were cut off in 1987–88. That is double the rate for 1983. During the same period—

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but he has been speaking for 10 minutes and should begin to bring his remarks to a close.

§ Mr. Hughes
Fuel poverty and the material means to have fuel for warmth is the responsibility of every person in this country. William Beveridge said: We should regard want, squalor, disease and ignorance as common enemies of all of us—not as enemies with which each individual can seek a separate peace, escaping himself to personal prosperity while leaving his fellows in their clutches. That is the meaning of social conscience—that one should refuse to make a peace with social evil. We can afford to ensure that people do not go cold—it is simply a question of priorities. The Bill is a definition of the highest priority.