Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:37 pm on 26 January 2022.
Diolch, Jane. We absolutely are aware of the real cost-of-living crisis, particularly for people on off-grid oil, as you say. Just to say, we are currently consulting on the next iteration of the Warm Homes programme—so, to encourage everyone to respond to that. That's in order to support households to transition to both lower carbon heating, but also actually to assist with their domestic household bills as well. We obviously recognise the problem that you've just outlined so ably, and the difficulty the energy price increases have caused for households who are dependent on oil in particular. It is acknowledged in our cold weather resilience plan, which includes actions to better support households and work with oil suppliers to improve cold weather resilience for low-income households.
Just to emphasise, rural households are included within the scope of the assistance fund to support eligible off-grid homes with the cost of fuel and boiler repairs. It's often something that people don't realise—that they're eligible to apply for the discretionary assistance fund grant. We also are working closely with our single advice fund services, so that we are making sure that more vulnerable people get the advice and support they need to apply for the support that is available. And also then, on the longer term point, we're obviously rolling out the optimised retrofit programme, because we absolutely recognise that we've got some of the oldest housing stock in Europe, and that one-size-fits-all retrofit certainly does not work. And the whole purpose, as you've heard me saying before, of the optimised retrofit is to experiment with what will work, to bring those houses up to both the insulation and the domestic heating standards that we expect, to tackle both the climate emergency and the fuel poverty agenda that comes with living in a draughty and inefficient home.