Brian Mathew

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I thank the hon. Member for Normanton and Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) for securing this important debate. All of us have heard heart-wrenching stories from our constituencies of families struggling to heat their homes. Vulnerable pensioners are worried about staying warm in what has been a cold and damp winter. Nearly 5,000 households in my constituency, or 11.3%, are classified as being fuel-poor or in fuel poverty. They struggle to keep their homes warm, spend a high proportion of their household income on heating their homes, or live in energy-inefficient homes that make keeping warm incredibly difficult, with the choice of keeping warm or putting food on the table a real one. It is worth noting that just 1,372 pensioners in my constituency—6% of the total number—are on pension credit. That raises further questions about those who did not apply for pension credit, even though they may deserve it, or who fall just outside the limit but are actually in fuel poverty. In a first-world, highly developed country, that is unacceptable; it is unacceptable that people in one of the richest nations of the world struggle to keep their homes warm in winter. Fuel poverty has impacts outside of energy policy: it affects people’s physical and mental health, and it adds demands to the NHS’s winter crisis. We must tackle fuel poverty by looking for both long-term and immediate solutions. In the long term, we must retrofit houses to make them more energy-efficient, insulating homes and installing heat pumps. Immediately, however, we must provide vulnerable households such as those in Melksham and Devizes with more support to pay unaffordable energy bills, and we must restore the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners.