Government work on better standards of homes will continue - Martin McCluskey
I grew up in a four in a block council flat in the area that I represent in parliament and that shaped not only my life but also the life of my parents and grandparents who moved to this block in the 1940s. That’s three generations, nearly 70 years under the same roof in Greenock, which is near Glasgow.
So I know what it means to grow up in a home that gives you the best start in life. I’ve seen how hard it is for people at the moment especially to haul themselves up when their life is built on weak foundations, when they grow up in fuel poverty and they don’t have a secure, comfortable home to be the anchor in their life.
Now as minister in this job, dealing not just with the home retrofit, social housing, energy efficiency, but also energy prices, my mission is to get more of what I had to people across the country, to finally address one of the greatest structural challenges we face in this country, the state of our housing stock.
And you all know the statistics, we have some of the oldest homes in Europe, 40 per cent of them were built before World War II.
That’s millions of people, many of whom live in social housing, who are growing up in old, cold, damp, leaking homes, which, because they’re overwhelmingly heated by gas, leave them especially vulnerable to the energy price shock we’ve seen in recent years.
The cost of energy bills combined with the state of our housing stock traps too many people in a miserable cycle of energy debt and fuel poverty, wasting their money on inefficiently heated homes, unable to invest in the upgrades that will bring them some sense of relief.
That’s why it’s our duty as a government to address this.
I know the world’s eyes have been drawn to Westminster in recent days, but that doesn’t change the fact that across the country there are thousands and thousands of people living in fuel poverty, children growing up sick, living in constant fear of rising films, incubating disease caused by constant exposure to damp and mould.
It shouldn’t have taken the death of Awaab Ishak, who died aged two in 2020 due to the effects of terrible mould exposure, to show just how urgent this crisis is.
Whatever happens in government in the weeks ahead, addressing this will continue to be our work. We want to give people the best possible start in life. We want to give people pride, comfort and dignity in their homes.
We want children to stop coming into school telling their teachers about being cold at home, and we want to protect people from the effects of wars that weren’t our choice, that are happening half a world away.
And this government has acted over the past two years, a new Decent Homes Standard to deliver warmer, healthier homes with lower bills.
Awaab’s Law, which has introduced strict time-bound requirements for social landlords to address emergency hazards and of course the Renters Rights Act, which carries these reforms into the private rented sector.
And I’m proud that in the department I’m part of in Energy Security and Net Zero, we’ve introduced other measures to help some of the most vulnerable people in our country. We’ve expanded the £150 warm home discount to over six million families every winter into the next decade. We’ve stepped in to help heating oil customers at the start of the war in Iran and we’re preparing for all contingencies this autumn and winter to deal with the increasing cost of energy bills.
An abridged version of a speech by Martin McCluskey, Minister for Energy Consumers, at the Housing 2026 conference.