Well, I welcome the statement, and of course I'm entirely in favour of the Warm Homes programme. I'm delighted that the Government has invested £248 million in it over a period of years. It is undoubtedly a very cost-effective investment in keeping people's homes warm. As Llyr Gruffydd pointed out earlier on, failing to do this effectively in new homes will have effects that go on maybe for 100 years, the length of life of the property. Therefore, the Part L regulations are an important element in this and I certainly support the case that he made for this to be an area of priority for the Government to make more effective.

Certainly, the other parts of the statement—the average EPC rating of homes in Wales is now at band D, whereas 10 years ago it was at band E—that's very welcome. The health conditions pilot I certainly am very supportive of, and also the imaginative scheme to help people with call-outs for repair of broken central heating boilers and so on in the winter. Those kinds of micro measures, I think, are very desirable in themselves, quite apart from any global warming issues that are behind these policies. 

So, yes, I welcome all that, and I welcome the Government's commitment to tackle fuel poverty, but it would be more impressive if they weren't doing so much to cause it in the first place. We've had these arguments many times before, but given that now people's electricity and gas bills basically are 20 per cent higher than they need be because of taxes—and, indeed, an EU-imposed VAT directive that adds an unnecessary 5 per cent to people's bills, which we'll be able to take off straight away when we ultimately leave the EU—there are great opportunities in Brexit if we revise our views on the EU's policies on global warming, which it would be open to us to do post Brexit. We'll be able to make a substantial reduction in the bills of some of the poorest people in our society.

As Mark Isherwood pointed out, the figures we've been working on are 23 per cent of the houses in Wales in fuel poverty spending more than 10 per cent of their income—10 per cent of their income—on keeping warm in the winter. These are astonishing figures for a country at the beginning of the twenty-first century in what is supposed to be one of the most developed countries in the world. I think it's a shameful indictment of the failure of successive Governments of all parties that so many of our citizens are suffering in this way and it should be one of our highest priorities to do something about it.

But what is being gained by these policies that are imposing such great burdens upon the people who are least able to bear them? What's happening in the rest of the world? There is supposedly going to be a rise in carbon dioxide emissions in 2018—the figures are only coming out now—by 2.7 per cent. That's an increase in global emissions sharply up on the plateau from 2014-16, and a 1 per cent rise that occurred in 2017. Where is this coming from? Well, according to the Global Carbon Project, all countries are contributing to this rise, with emissions in China up 4.7 per cent, the United States by 2.5 per cent, and India by a staggering 6.3 per cent up on the year before, largely driven by their 8 per cent economic growth achievement, which is a good thing in itself.

This is being driven in all fuel sectors as well. In India, for example, this 6.3 per cent growth is being generated by a 7.1 per cent increase in the use of coal, a 2.9 per cent increase in the use of oil, and a 6 per cent increase in the use of gas. They are going massively in the opposite direction to the one that the energy Secretary is saying Wales should do. Wales contributes 0.01 per cent to global emissions of carbon dioxide. The increase in India's emissions last year amounted to five times that. We could close down the entire Welsh economy, we could expel all the people from Wales—indeed they could all die—and Wales would have a zero carbon footprint. India would wipe that out in the increases in its economy alone in 10 weeks. That is the price that all these people in fuel poverty are paying for 10 weeks of India's increase in their own carbon emissions.

I think this is a staggeringly irrational policy on the part of the Welsh Government and the UK Government and indeed of the entire European Union. UKIP is the only party in this Assembly that offers a different road. Our policy is to put the economic well-being of people, and particularly the poorest people in society first, not fantasy policies about global warming, which we can do nothing to change.