More than 80% of fuel poor households in Wales live in inefficient homes, higher than in any other UK nation, highlighting National Energy Action (NEA) Cymru’s concerns that current schemes are insufficient to deal with the scale of fuel poverty in Wales, and their call for guaranteed support for the ‘worst first’.
There is an urgent need to upgrade the energy efficiency of fuel poor homes in Wales, to make them much warmer, greener, healthier places to live, with energy bills that are permanently low.
In a letter in response to me as Chair of the Cross-Party Group on Fuel Poverty in April, the Minister for Climate Change stated that she expects to procure a new demand-led Scheme to replace Nest “by the end of the calendar year”, adding “this will enable the new Scheme to be awarded late autumn and mobilised over the winter with delivery expected from late winter”.
The Cross-Party Group believes it is imperative that the Welsh Government now implements the new Warm Homes Programme with urgency, ensuring that a replacement demand-led Scheme for Nest is operational this winter, with eligibility and scale confirmed.
The Senedd’s Equality and Social Justice Committee Report on Fuel Poverty and the Warm Homes Programme made several welcome recommendations regarding the next iteration of the Warm Homes Programme, including for the Welsh Government to ensure the Programme:
- embeds the ‘fabric and worst first’ approach to retrofitting, targeting the poorest households in the least fuel-efficient homes;
- is bigger in scale, with smarter, less restrictive eligibility criteria, and greener in its interventions, looking to cover the cost of enabling works, removing the single application cap to help accommodate multiple measures, and designing a more intelligent means of limiting costs
- and is backed by a robust data collection, monitoring and evaluation framework, with a fit-for-purpose quality assurance regime.
This remains the best, lasting way of tackling fuel poverty, reducing the amount of energy fuel poor households need to use to heat their homes in the first place and providing a permanent reduction in energy bills.
In the years to come, the next Scheme and Programme will need to be backed by sufficient, increased funding if the Welsh Government is to meet its 2035 fuel poverty targets and contribute to efforts to reach Net Zero.
Although the Welsh Government has issued a policy statement on its Warm Homes Programme today, it is now imperative that the scheme is operational as soon as possible. Further, Important detail including eligibility and scale are still to be confirmed.
Unprecedented steps were taken by the UK Government to support people with the cost-of-living following Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, with its massive impacts on global food and fuel prices, and the pressures on the economy caused by the pandemic. This enabled the Welsh Government to double the Winter Fuel Support Scheme payment to £200 for eligible households to help with fuel prices.
Speaking here as Chair of the Cross-Party Group on Fuel Poverty and Energy Efficiency last year, I called for the Scheme’s eligibility criteria to be extended and was grateful when the Minister subsequently did this.
However, questioning the Social Justice Minister here in January and again last month following the Welsh Government's announcement that it was not continuing the Winter Fuel Scheme beyond 2022-23, I asked her whether this would be scrapped entirely, replaced by the original £100 payment, or replaced by something else.
I would be grateful if the Minister (Climate Change) could answer this now.
“Further, questioning her here last month, I noted her confirmation to my Office that although the Welsh Government had made up to £90 million available for payments to eligible low-income households under the 2022-23 Winter Fuel Support Scheme, and estimated that approximately 427,000 households would be eligible, less than £65 million had been spent on this by 28th February this year, when applications closed, with Local Authorities across Wales reporting that just 316,000 households had applied to the Scheme and that only 341,468 had received a payment.
I asked her whether this underspend would therefore be carried forward, and if not, why not.
However, it was not confirmed if this underspend will be carried forward to help the most vulnerable in fuel poverty and I would be grateful if you could also answer this now.
Lessons also need to be learned on how benefit take up is maximised in the future.
As the Bevan Foundation reiterated in April, the Welsh Government should establish a coherent and integrated Welsh Benefits System for all the means-tested benefits it is responsible for.