It is an absolute scandal, is it not, that over half our energy is now generated by renewables, yet we are still submitting poor people to this sort of treatment? The energy system is absolutely broken.

I wanted to focus on how effective the method of getting payments to people was. So, I spoke to Ofgem, who assured me that companies are adding credit automatically, where possible, if customers have a smart prepayment meter—if it’s working correctly. It should automatically add that £45 a week to the household’s credit balance. If the meter is faulty, I’m told households are sent a code by text or e-mail, so that they can use that to then top up their credit online. As a last resort, a voucher is issued to a customer by post, and I’ll come back to why that is a last resort.

If a household has a traditional prepayment meter, they either get a credit when they top up at their usual top-up point—and it's good to see exactly how much information energy companies hold about individuals; Sarah Murphy is not in the room at the moment, but this is a big data protection issue—or they get a voucher through the post as a last resort. And the reason why I describe this as a last resort is that we have huge amounts of evidence that people who are struggling financially stop opening the post—that is the way they cope with it. So, they think that every single letter that isn't from their granddaughter is going to be another demand for money that they haven't got. So, they never find out about the voucher that they desperately need to help them pay for heating.

Now, no information as yet is available of the cost-benefit analysis of different delivery methods of support, but there's clearly a lot of work to be done. So, for example, in Cardiff Central, between October and December last year, nearly 105,000 households should have got their money, but for 2,000 of them, it was simply never delivered. So, 2,000 never got the payments they were entitled to, and that is the payment that Boris Johnson got and that everybody else in this room got—2,000 of the poorest people never got that money. What is the explanation for that? And, equally, where vouchers had been issued to 6,800 households, there were just over 4,000 households where those vouchers were redeemed; 1,600 people never got them. Nobody ever knocked the door and said, 'Did you get the voucher, missus, or should we reissue you with a new one?'

These are really important issues and, thank goodness, on top of that, we have the Welsh Government fuel voucher statistics as well to go on, because the £200 pushed out by the Welsh Government was targeted at those who actually needed it rather than at those who could afford to pay. And the Fuel Bank Foundation has had a huge increase in the number of organisations that are now associating with them. They issued over 17,000 vouchers to support people who weren't able to afford to top up their prepayment meter; 44,000 people, of whom, over 40 per cent were children—the children who couldn't afford to have a bath or a hot meal or read a book before they went to bed. I think what's a worrying statistic for me is that only 148 households received help to purchase off-grid fuel. What are local authorities in areas where a lot of the dwellings are off grid doing to ensure that people, who should be getting that help, are getting it?

So, I think that all of this tells us that we need to—. Just as we need to regulate local authorities who use unregulated bailiffs to collect council tax debts, we clearly need to regulate energy suppliers who use unlicensed bailiffs to break into people's homes. The Enforcement Conduct Board has got to be given some regulatory teeth to enforce that and, frankly, the energy companies need to have some controls put around them in the way that water companies cannot cut off people's water. We need to ensure that the minimum amount of energy is being provided to every household in this country—as I say, the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world.