Yes, but, as I understand it, the money announced in the pre-Budget report was exactly that-it will not do anything to help vulnerable people this winter. To put the figures into context, the Treasury collected £9 billion of VAT receipts from UK utilities and £1.2 billion from domestic fuel customers last year.

Rising bills have been fuelled by the Government's lack of a credible energy policy. Allowing utilities to sweat assets and the failure to bring a greater strategic focus to infrastructure renewal have left the UK a net importer of gas with a looming energy crunch. That, combined with only 14 days' gas storage, leaves the UK vulnerable to spikes on the spot market, gives utilities a fig leaf for raising electricity bills, and is a particular threat to off-grid consumers.

The solution to many of those challenges is simple, straightforward and pays for itself: greater energy efficiency. In the home, that means energy saving and insulation. Some 33 per cent. of the heat lost from an uninsulated house is lost through the walls. One could save around £90 on energy each year in an average home by insulating wall cavities alone. That would save about £720 million of energy a year, or 9 million tonnes of carbon-enough to power 1.8 million homes for the same period.

Despite the clear economic and social advantages of increasing energy efficiency at scale, we are not moving at the scale and pace that is needed. That is why, a year ago, the leader of my party announced an energy refit programme, the Conservatives' green deal, that would establish a new model with a far greater sense of ambition for delivering energy efficiency throughout the UK-a new way of tackling this embedded social and economic problem. Under the Conservatives' approach, households would get instant access to the measures to make energy efficiency improvements, the cost of which would be paid back, not by the householder, but by the owner of the property who pays the electricity bill over 20 years through a surcharge on bills, just as transmission charges, for example, are currently levied on an electricity bill. That would guarantee immediate savings, so homeowners would see not only an improvement in their quality of life, but an immediate saving. With a street-by-street roll-out in partnership with local authorities and by targeting vulnerable households, that policy will also bring together the dual priorities of reducing fuel poverty and reducing carbon emissions, but on a far more meaningful time scale than has been achieved by the Government over the past 13 years.

When we first set out the principle of our energy efficiency measures, it was routinely rubbished by Labour Ministers. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change dismissed it as a

"a bad combination of...reheated and...uncosted" policies. They pooh-poohed the figure of £6,500, saying that it could not be afforded, yet the beauty of our scheme is that there would be no overall charge to public funds. The scheme will be privately financed by banks and investment funds: I have met many of their representatives and they are keen to enter this new, exciting market. But one year on, it is no surprise that the Government have realised that they simply cannot go forward with their own policies and have produced, I am glad to see, something that is remarkably similar to the Conservatives' programme, with a few tweaks at the edges. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it is disappointing that it has taken the Government 13 years to do that. Now in their death throes, in their last weeks in Government, they have finally had to admit that their policy has not worked and they need to come up with something else. However, that is welcome in so far as it means that, in the new Parliament, there will be much greater consensus on the way forward on tackling this urgent problem.

I am concerned that the Government have not really had a genuine change of heart and that this is just a political ruse. Their policy is undermined by its being twinned with renewable energy and renewable energy feed-in tariffs. Burrowing into the Government's statistics, their own anticipated forecast and target is that by 2020 only 1.6 per cent. of our energy will come from decentralised energy sources supported by feed-in tariffs. If that fact is married to the "Warmer Homes, Greener Homes" strategy, that is a pathetically unambitious and impoverished figure that shows that that is not a genuine adoption of the agenda but is merely a political manoeuvre to try to parry a radical proposal from the Conservatives. I am sorry that the Government are not really, in their heart of hearts, keen to embrace this agenda, but I welcome any moves towards it.

I want to give the Minister time to reply to the many points that have been raised, but insofar as we see any consensus in the Chamber today there is consensus on business as usual not being good enough. We are not making the progress that we need to make. We need fresh ideas, new thinking and a far more ambitious time scale on implementation. We need to embrace new technologies as well as new financing models. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. Ultimately, the only way that we are going to get to grips with this agenda to do justice to the fuel-poor as well as to our carbon transformation is to sweep away this tired, end-of-life Government.