18. What support his Department provides to community initiatives to help households reduce their carbon emissions. (91749)

The coalition has big ambitions for community energy. Last week, we announced 82 community winners in the first tranche of DECC’s £10 million competition to help mobilise community energy groups. I will be announcing funding for at least another 100 winning schemes early next month. This new fund is just one element of our strategy to drive local and community energy action.

We need consistency in Government policy. City of York council has spent time and money developing a solar energy scheme for council houses, and yet it has been blown out of the water by the Minister’s announcement of 31 October. In order to ensure continuity of policy, do the Government agree that those councils whose schemes to develop solar energy for council houses were being developed before the announcement should continue to get the feed-in tariff at the previous rate?

Unfortunately, the scheme that the hon. Gentleman refers to—the feed-in tariffs—was devised and implemented by Ed Miliband—[Interruption.]

Order. The hon. Gentleman should observe the correct forms of address, and he should not refer—[Interruption.] Order. He should not refer to another Member by name in that way. He should briefly finish his answer and resume his seat.

The feed-in tariffs were devised by the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), and unfortunately did not anticipate a single scheme of the type to which the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) refers. Under our reformed and restructured feed-in tariff schemes, in the future we very much hope that those schemes will be able to be supported, unlike the shambles of the scheme that we inherited from Labour.