Money spent on recent household energy bill bailouts could have been used more efficiently if cuts to insulation budgets by the Conservative government after its 2015 General Election victory had not taken place, a minister has admitted.
During a House of Lords debate, Liberal Democrat Lord Teverson said the UK would be in a ‘better position than we are now’ if the then Chancellor, George Osborn, had not ‘massacred various energy efficiency schemes’. Pointing to the £37bn of energy bills support, he added: ‘If only we were managing to put that money into these sorts of schemes, those fuel poverty numbers would start to come down rather than inevitably skyrocketing.’
Construction minister Lord Callanan said he ‘entirely accepted’ the criticism: ‘If we had spent some of this money on insulation schemes in previous years, that might have been a more efficient use of it.’
