Chamber and committees

All of Scotland’s local authorities have been offered funding from the current budget of £55 million for this financial year for area based schemes.

It should be noted an unallocated amount of £5 million has been reallocated from the original budget of £60 million for area based schemes to mitigate the impact of the “bedroom tax”. A further £5 million from underutilised accruals (i.e. unused provision) from 2012-13 takes the total contribution to £10 million.

Details of funding requested by councils as at end June 2013 are set out in the table below. All requests have been allocated in full. Requests for further funding are currently being considered and will be announced in due course.

Summary of Local Authority Funding Requests – to end June 2013

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

I met with each of the major energy suppliers individually over the autumn/winter of last year to raise concerns about energy price rises and to press the individual energy suppliers to support vulnerable consumers and will be looking to arrange further meetings with the utilities in due course to keep up the dialogue on fuel poverty.

We are working closely with Ofgem to ensure the monitoring information they publish on ECO investment covers all of Scotland and provides sufficient level of detail to enable us to monitor the effectiveness of our programmes. And we will collect monitoring information from local authorities setting out how our investment has been used to deliver energy efficiency measures and help to tackle fuel poverty.

The Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland (HEEPS) have a current budget of £74 million for this financial year and it is the Scottish Government’s intention that this is all spent on tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency.

It should be noted that an unallocated amount of £5 million has been reallocated from the original budget of £60 million for area based schemes to mitigate the impacts of welfare reform. A further £5 million from underutilised accruals (i.e. unused provision) from 2012-13 takes the total contribution to £10 million.

It is not possible at this time to know how much Scottish Government funding has been spent as schemes are still developing and monitoring processes are being put in place. However, in June we announced the first £46 million of funding for local authorities from our HEEPS area based schemes and local authorities advise us that, currently, they intend to leverage almost £130 million of ECO funding from energy companies.

Information on HEEPS spend will be published in due course.

In June offers of grant totalling £46 million were issued for the first round of HEEPS area based schemes.

A second funding round is currently being assessed and allocations will be announced shortly.

However, delays in the publication of the ECO guidance, leading to uncertainty about how the new schemes would work, and a shift in focus under ECO away from cheaper, easier to install measures, such as loft insulation, to more technically complex insulation techniques, has meant that there have been delays in developing ECO-eligible schemes.

We are currently considering a number of options for assessing the effectiveness of the Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland. As part of this we will closely monitor the number of households assisted and the number of measures delivered.

The Scottish Government has a statutory duty, “to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that people are not living in fuel poverty in Scotland by November 2016”.

The Scottish Government is committed to eradicating fuel poverty and is doing everything within its limited powers to achieve this. As fuel poverty statistics published in December 2012 show, Scottish Government action is mitigating swingeing fuel price increases. Despite 14% fuel price increases in Autumn 2011, Scottish Government action to improve household energy efficiency prevented a further 35,000 households falling into fuel poverty.

The SHCS shows that fuel poverty for Scotland in October 2011, following a steep fuel price increase, was nearly 29% (approximately 684,000 households).

Local authority levels of fuel poverty are published on the internet and are publicly available on the Scottish Government website under: Scottish House Condition Survey - 2009-2011 Local Authority Report: Table 8.10.

The Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland (HEEPS) area based local authority schemes have a current budget of £55 million for this financial year and it is the Scottish Government’s intention that this is all spent on tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency.

It should be noted that an unallocated amount of £5 million has been reallocated from the original budget of £60 million for area based schemes to mitigate the impacts of welfare reform. A further £5 million from underutilised accruals (i.e. unused provision) from 2012-13 takes the total contribution to £10 million.

Delays in the publication of the ECO guidance, leading to uncertainty about how the new schemes would work, and a shift in focus under ECO away from cheaper, easier to install measures, such as loft insulation, to more technically complex insulation techniques, has meant that there have been delays in developing ECO-eligible schemes.

It is not possible at this time to know how much Scottish Government funding has been spent as schemes are still developing and monitoring processes are being put in place.