I am grateful for that intervention. I am sure that the Minister heard the point and will respond.

Some smaller heating oil companies in my constituency endeavour to help people struggling with their bills, for example by allowing them to spread payments regularly over weeks or months so that they do not have to pay huge lumps of cash up front when the oil tank has to be filled up every couple of months. My constituents have had to fill their oil tanks more frequently over the past two or three months because of the severity of the winter conditions. After Christmas, the road conditions made it difficult for oil companies to get oil to people's homes and there was a serious risk of shortages. I am grateful to the Government for acting to lift some of the working-hours regulations to address that issue. Many companies would like explicitly to provide social tariffs in this sector to people in the most difficult financial circumstances, but are unable to do so because of their relationships with large oil companies and the lack of regulation.

My second point about such households concerns access to home insulation and other energy efficiency measures, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon rightly devoted a large portion of his speech. As such help is delivered partly through electricity and gas companies, those who have an unregulated oil provider have less access to such help to improve their homes.

I have investigated the systems that have been put in place in Scotland, such as energy helplines. Although in theory there are measures available to help people in older homes that use heating oil, in practice they are hard to get. One organisation I talked to could give only one example of someone having an air-source heat pump installed as an alternative to oil, but could give hundreds of examples of people who had received a bit of loft insulation. I am not decrying the importance of loft insulation, but the people I am describing tend to need more expensive measures that are just as necessary, if not more necessary, because of the circumstances in which they live.