Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)

My Lords, this order makes modest changes to the energy company obligation—ECO—scheme, and I was pleased to see the Minister in the other place recognise that ECO4 and the GB Insulation Scheme have been a key part of the effort to upgrade homes across the country. These schemes were introduced under the previous Government to support better insulation of energy customers’ homes, and I am pleased that the Minister has recognised the success of the previous Government in this area. We will not oppose this statutory instrument. The previous Government announced that more than 300,000 homes would get insulation installed under GBIS, and they said that this could potentially save families up to an average of £400 a year on their energy bills. Claire Coutinho, then the Secretary of State, said that the introduction of GBIS would help hundreds of thousands of people, including some of the most vulnerable in society, get the upgrades their homes need while cutting their energy bills. So this is a Conservative initiative, and we are pleased to see that this Government are building on that track record. It is concerning that some of the insulation installed under the schemes has not met the appropriate standards, and Ministers are right to tackle this as a matter of urgency. Can the Minister confirm what proportion of the identified issues has now been solved, and can he confirm that no energy customer should be out of pocket as a result of this remediation work? We know that high energy costs are one of the greatest challenges in our economy at the moment. High energy bills contribute to growing household costs for families, but they are also holding back businesses and stifling growth. One of the key reasons that the UK manufacturing sector is finding it so difficult to grow at the moment is high energy costs, so we would welcome the Government’s continued commitment to energy efficiency and insulation—this is positive work—but we also need to tackle head-on the challenges we face on energy prices, and that means supply-side reform. We must urgently address the energy baseload challenge and get the right mix of cheap energy from all sources so that households and businesses across the UK can thrive. We support steps to improve household insulation, but can the Minister take this opportunity to set out what steps the Government are taking to tackle energy prices more broadly for households and businesses in the UK? Can he comment on further investment—for example, new nuclear and long-term energy storage—towards that objective? What assessment have Ministers made of the impact of spikes in wind energy production on the cost of energy to consumers? We egregiously pay wind turbine operators to turn off the supply of energy when it spikes, and when we find ourselves in periods of no wind and no sun, we pay exorbitant sums to emergency energy suppliers, which burn gas as a peak supply instead of baseload. What steps will Ministers be taking to review the overall situation so that we can not only deliver better-insulated homes as part of this but, as another key part, drive down the costs of energy for families and businesses?