Housing: Home Insulation Grants

Lord Judd
asked Her Majesty's Government:

What steps they are taking to ensure that those in greatest social need are helped to understand and secure home insulation grants. [HL3100]

The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Rooker)
The Government's main programme for eradicating fuel poverty in England is the Warm Front scheme, which provides a variety of heating, insulation and energy efficiency measures to vulnerable households. The scheme engages with those in greatest social need, including rural, private landlord and black and minority ethnic households, through targeted activities run in conjunction with landlords' forums, private sector housing and regeneration teams at a number of local authorities. In addition, working closely with local authority benefit managers remains a key priority by providing opportunity to successfully target the most vulnerable households readily eligible for assistance. Warm Front also has a network of organisations operating in the charitable sector that proactively promote and refer back to Warm Front. Marketing of the Warm Front scheme is continually developing to ensure the right information reaches those in most need of assistance.

The carbon emission reduction target (CERT), which started in April 2008, is an obligation on energy suppliers to achieve targets for promoting reductions in carbon emissions in the household sector. Under CERT, energy suppliers are required to direct 40 per cent of their carbon savings to a priority group of low income and elderly consumers. Suppliers may use a variety of methods to identify priority group consumers. These include setting out the priority group criteria in promotional material; partnership arrangements with bodies like social housing providers or charities that work with priority group consumers; and showing consumers the priority group criteria when giving out measures person-to-person.