HC Deb 03 April 2001 vol 366 cc99-100W
Mr. Don Foster

To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, pursuant to his answer on 27 March 2001,Official Report, column 568W,

The main difficulty encountered by HEES is recruiting sufficient contractors to install and repair gas central heating systems. This is caused by the national shortage of qualified heating engineers. To address the problem, scheme managers are seeking additional qualified heating installers, and encouraging existing installers to increase the number of installation teams dedicated to HEES. These efforts have substantially increased the number of installations and cut the time taken to install measures to less than three months in most areas of England.

In conjunction with Transco plc and the Gas Industry National Training Organisation, my Department introduced training programmes to provide an additional 800 gas engineers over the next 12 months to work under HEES. These will enable the scheme to cope better with short-term fluctuations.