Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Last week, and in observance of National Fuel Poverty Awareness Day, National Energy Action Wales, with support from SSE, hosted this year’s fuel poverty conference entitled ‘Tackling Fuel Poverty & Inequality: The Road Ahead’. It provided an opportunity for Government, Ofgem and key partners representing the energy and third sectors to come together to share successes and identify challenges, but more importantly to consider how best we can work together in partnership to support people in our society whose lives continue to be blighted by living in a cold home. Today, I would like to take this opportunity to reaffirm this Government’s commitment to tackling fuel poverty and improving the energy efficiency of our housing, whilst being good global citizens by reducing our carbon footprint and reducing the share of the world’s resources we take for our own needs.

Everyone should live in a decent home. Decent homes create decent communities in which everyone can play a part. Warm and affordable houses prevent ill health, they help our children do well in school and ensure some of our most vulnerable people feel more secure. This is why our focus on creating decent homes and tackling fuel poverty is so important. Since its launch almost 10 years ago, our Warm Homes programme, which includes the demand-led Nest scheme and the area-based Arbed scheme, has provided energy efficiency advice to more than 112,000 people and has improved more than 50,000 homes by installing home energy efficiency measures. Without this assistance, we estimate that more than 80,000 homes would have been facing the unmanageable burden of keeping warm this winter. Extending this programme until 2021 should enable us to improve up to a further 25,000 homes.

The investment of £248 million, which we've delivered through our Warm Homes programme up to the end of March 2018, has been in addition to support offered by the UK Government through the energy company obligation scheme. The new ECO scheme now has a greater emphasis on people living on lower incomes. This will better enable larger energy companies to play their part in making more affordable warmth a reality.

The investment made in improving the energy efficiency of Welsh homes, together with our ongoing investment to implement the Welsh quality housing standard in the social housing sector, has had a positive impact. The result of the latest Welsh housing conditions survey reports the average energy performance certificate rating of homes in Wales in this latest survey is at band D, compared to the average band E rating in 2008. However, despite our efforts, the number of people struggling to maintain a safe and warm home during the winter remains stubbornly high. More than one in five households, unfortunately, continues to live in fuel poverty.

Our health conditions pilot, introduced in 2017, is designed to support our efforts to reduce the levels of illness and premature winter deaths, made worse from living in a cold home. The pilot extends eligibility to enable our Nest scheme to support people living on lower incomes, not in receipt of income-related benefits, living with a chronic respiratory or similar health condition. I have agreed to extend this pilot for a further year. This will ensure the people most at risk of respiratory and associated conditions can continue to receive the help and support they need and will contribute to reducing winter pressures on our health services.

This winter, I have also agreed to make funding available to provide support for our most vulnerable citizens who are living in a cold home for the sake of the cost of a call-out charge needed to repair a broken central heating boiler. Supporting people to restore heating in their homes, especially for homes with children, older people and disabled people, must be one of our shared priorities.

Turning to the future, my intention is to publish our new plan for tackling fuel poverty at next year’s fuel poverty awareness conference, following a public consultation in the autumn. The new plan will include outcome-focused objectives that are aspirational. However, we must take care our aspirations are deliverable in the short, medium and longer term, and are clearly aligned to our wider decarbonisation agenda. On that basis, the Welsh Government is keen to work with the energy sector, our stakeholders in the public and third sectors, the UK Government and the energy regulator, to ensure we develop and deliver a plan that achieves our mutually shared ambitions. If we are to live up to our principled approach, balancing the need to tackle fuel poverty, whilst at the same time reducing carbon emissions from the 1.4 million homes in Wales, must remain core to our future plans.