L

Lord Whitehead (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 27 January 2026

Debate

Warm Homes Plan

Contribution

My noble friend is quite right. We are going to need a great deal of upskilling of individuals who are participating in this programme to make sure that they provide the best possible service that they can. Indeed, to return to that PAC report on ECO4, that was perhaps an element of the process whereby people were putting, in particular, external home cladding into place without really knowing what they were doing. It is very important that we do that and that we see the jobs that are going to come out of this programme—200,000 or so of them—as permanent, long-term, skilled jobs and not fly-by-night little contract jobs. We want to make sure that we are investing in real jobs and good jobs. I bear the scars of the previous things and congratulate my noble friend on his hand in Warm Front, which he will recall, along with programmes such as CERT and CEFs, really made a difference at that early stage. It is tragic that they all collapsed in the way they did. The opportunity now not only to bring back the lessons learned from those programmes but to expand them in the way that has been done warms the bottom of my heart.

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