Speeches by Dixon.

“I want to make sure I have covered the prepayment meter issue. You are talking about how many vouchers were redeemed, but for this sort of scheme, these people are the most vulnerable customers and they are the hardest to reach, as you have described, particularly those on the traditional type of meter. I am keen to kn…”

“Just to give us a sense of scale.”

“How many customers fall into that bracket of using traditional PPM?”

“We talked earlier about some of the issues relating to the administrative ability to target. Looking at the impact of the programmes, my colleague Clive Betts has talked about the impact on low-income households. I would like to go a little bit further into the so-called vulnerable customers and look at how the support…”

“Thank you.”

“But with HMRC, you feel, because of the nature of the data—”

“And you are exploring it with the NHS to a degree.”

“Obviously, that sort of infrastructure will be useful not only if there is another spike, but potentially in targeting particular schemes around warm homes. We know some of the poorer homes are the worst insulated and their occupants are the most affected by fuel poverty, so they benefit the most from home insulation. …”

“Before you do, one of the reasons for universality is that targeting is simply administratively not possible. Obviously, we want to be in a position where future Ministers actually have a choice, even if on balance, and from what you have said universal is occasionally appropriate. Had we wished to target, could we hav…”

“To get these schemes up and running quickly, they were universal schemes rather than schemes targeted at particular households who really needed that financial support. We could argue from a value-for-money point of view that there was quite a lot of dead-weight cost in the schemes, and I think there was also some sens…”

“A 10% fault rate is not ideal and has certainly undermined confidence. The main issue is to address that defective rate and ensure that the contractors under the Government scheme meet the standards.”

“Good morning, witnesses. I want to raise an issue that is affecting not only my constituents but constituents quite widely, and that is retrofit schemes. Under the previous Government’s scheme there were a number of companies that went around quite aggressively selling the retrofitting of cavity wall insulation, includ…”

“Fine. I will leave that then.”

“Some will no doubt be run out of houses, so there is a crossover between domestic and non-domestic. Chair, are you going to pick up some of the issues to do with customers who are in debt?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. My final question is about those who are self-employed, where, effectively, you do not have a very good record of income. What did you do there to target support? Again, have you learned anything that is useful for the future?”

“Yes, I am asking what we have learned and how that is being used.”

“I have had colleagues in the House talking about ceramics, and we have industries effectively going to the wall at the moment, largely because of high energy prices. I am just wondering what you are doing, as a Department, to build resilience in these energy-intensive sectors.”

“Now that you have a better sense of that, how would you target support differently in the non-domestic sector in future, particularly for those that are higher energy but perhaps more susceptible because they have not got the buying power of some of the bigger non-domestic customers to get good deals? How are you suppo…”

“Thank you. The other targeting was around what you understood about the non-domestic sector. In answer to my colleague’s question, you said that, at the start of this, you probably knew least about the non-domestic sector. So what have you learned, and how are you using that data, particularly where we are looking at e…”