Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 11 January 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:02, 11 January 2022

Well, Llywydd, the real risk here is not that we can bring the fuel poverty target forward, but that what is about to happen to families in April will plunge more families in Wales into fuel poverty rather than reduce that number. We know that people at the bottom end of the income spectrum spend a significantly higher proportion of their income on fuel bills than people who are better off, and more of those families are going to find themselves having to deal with the consequences of the failure of the Conservative Government in England. It was a Conservative Government that turned energy supply and fuel in the United Kingdom into a market solution, and we have seen an utter failure in that market, while the UK Government stands back and does absolutely nothing about it. Twenty-eight companies have gone to the wall and, on top of the £500 that families will have to pay because of the failure of the UK Government to get a grip on energy prices, they’re all going to be asked to pay £100 a year to deal with the consequences of those market failures as well. Try as the Welsh Government will to use all the things that we are able to mobilise to help families, the overriding responsibilities in this area lie with the UK Government—a UK Government that could reverse its universal credit cuts, a Government that could think of other ways in which those fuel bills can be more fairly shared across people, and could live up to its responsibilities instead of, as the Prime Minister does today and in so many areas of life, simply hiding and dodging on the things that ought to be on the top of his list of things to resolve.