Meeting of the Parliament 27 January 2016
I will. As I have explained before, in the current year, we set aside and are spending £119 million on fuel poverty. The £119 million figure included £15 million of consequentials that we received from the UK Government for the green deal home improvement scheme. With no warning to or consultation with the Scottish Government, the UK Government stopped the scheme, which meant that we did not get that £15 million. We have also had our overall budget cut by the UK Government.
We have asked this before, but if Jim Hume or anyone else in this chamber can tell us where to get that £15 million from our existing budgets, we are willing to listen. I have explained why the £15 million is no longer available, but we have maintained the rest of the budget—the £103 million—as we said that we would. No one has yet come across and said where to find the £15 million that has been taken from the Scottish Government budget.
Since 2009, we have allocated more than half a billion pounds to make Scotland’s homes more energy efficient, and more than 700,000 households have received assistance to help them heat their homes affordably. Most of those are our most vulnerable households.
I have already mentioned the £119 million budget allocation for 2015-16. Around 80 per cent of that is grant funding, which is targeted at the poorest households in Scotland to make their homes warmer and cheaper to heat.