Author Archives: mervynkohler

Fuel poverty numbers falling!

Posted on May 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

Well, that’s not a headline you expected to read. But that is the official story, as charted in the 2012 Annual Report on Fuel Poverty Statistics, published this week (17 May).

The number of households in fuel poverty in England was 4m in 2009: in this latest report covering the year 2010, the numbers had fallen to 3.5m. This seems counter-intuitive as our memory is of cold, hard winters and rising energy prices, but some interesting features emerge about 2010 from the report.

First, it was a cold year, with January, February and December being months with average temperatures well below the norm for the last five years.   Household energy consumption rose by about 10%. But energy prices were falling for the first time since 2000 – and of course have increased sharply again since 2010.

Second, incomes for most of the population increased by 2-3%, but for the poorest quintile the increase was 4%. This group includes a large proportion of the fuel poor, and the combination of better incomes and lower energy prices obviously feeds into the fuel poverty calculations.

Third, there was a startling improvement in the energy efficiency of our housing stock. Households with gas fired condensing boilers grew from 24% to 32%, and this more energy efficient equipment contributes to the story of an unusual year. The proportion of households in the upper four bands (out of seven) on the scale measuring energy efficiency rose from 52% to 57%.   Since then, the Warm Front programme has been drastically scaled down, reducing that option for a lot of fuel poor households.

In fairness, ministers are not presenting these figures as a policy triumph.   Their projections for 2011 and 2012 see fuel poverty numbers resuming their upward rise. The task of eradicating the scourge of fuel poverty (with its associated misery, illness and even death) remains a daunting one, and older households are very much in the front line. This time next year, with the next Annual Report, we will probably be delving into the thesaurus to find synonyms for depressing, lamentable or disgraceful.

Find out more about Age UK’s work to reduce the number of excess winter deaths.

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Getting the measure of fuel poverty

Posted on March 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

 The idea that a household is in fuel poverty if it needs to spend more than 10% of its income to keep adequately warm – the traditional definition of fuel poverty – is flawed.   The 10% just happened to be twice the average household spending in the 1990s.   Calculating a number based on this definition is a statistical exercise:  it is not based on actual household experience.   Consequently it has been difficult to accurately target programmes to assist the fuel poor, and these programmes have had to rely on imperfect proxy benefits designed for other purposes.

That is the rationale behind John Hills’ quest in his magisterial review of fuel poverty for a new definition.   He proposes instead to bring together data which matches low incomes with high energy costs, and supplement that with a new indicator measuring the ‘fuel poverty gap’ – the spending required by households with high costs compared to the median household.   The first gives a picture of fuel poverty:  the second shows the extent, the depth, of that fuel poverty.

The net result reduces the numbers in fuel poverty but by only a little, and the average depth of fuel poverty in 2009 stood at £414 per household.   Together, as Hills also comments, these paint a picture of a very serious problem, and it is still growing.   Analysing the impact of policies which will be in place through to 2016, there will be between 2.6 and 3 million households in fuel poverty (affecting over 8m individuals), and the fuel poverty gap will be £600.

Will the new measure help to target fuel poverty programmes better?   It is possible to identify low income households, but adding high costs will inevitably mean using proxies, such as having oil or solid fuel heating, having solid walls, living in a rural area off the gas grid, or in a pre-1945 house.   But Hills has given us a better picture of what sort of household to look for in what kind of property.

There is little comfort for the Government from all this impressive analysis.  Fuel poverty remains a big and growing problem, affecting health, poverty, communities and climate change.   There has to be a more robust policy response than the weird comment from DECC that Hills is ‘showing the positive impact of current Government policies are having on tackling fuel poverty’.   They are having the kind of impact a fire extinguisher has on a forest fire.  

Age UK is campaigning to reduce the number of excess winter deaths. Find out more about our Spread the Warmth campaign.

 Read the Hills Fuel Poverty Review final report

 

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What’s the point of the Age Action Alliance?

Posted on February 28, 2012 | 1 Comment

 The needs and aspirations of older people deserve more serious attention – not just because they are a fast growing element in the population.   They can no longer be lumped together and stereotyped as passive and undemanding ‘pensioners’:  they are the best educated, fittest, most diverse generation of older people we have ever seen in history.

Yet perversely, their numbers include a growing group of the most socially excluded people in society. Approaching one in five live below the poverty line, millions are living alone, and clusters of supportive family members living nearby is a thing of the past. Traditional networks centred on post offices, local bank branches, or village or neighbourhood retailers, are dwindling.   The digital age is advancing relentlessly, and a generation of older people are being left in the slipstream.   The loudest voices in society are calling for choice and ‘personalisation’, but this is merely confusing if not supported by information and advice.

Government, public services, the commercial world and the voluntary and community agencies need to take a fresh look at the older population in all these dimensions.   And against a backdrop of austerity, all need to find sharper, smarter ways of reaching out to older people.

That is the simple starting point of the Age Action Alliance. The objective is to:

  • bring together in new partnerships organisations which have neither thought nor needed to collaborate in the past,
  • explore ways of working together which can share insights, knowledge and resources,
  • seek new ways to deliver information, services and support to older people.  

 The focus is on people who are socially excluded or at risk of landing there.

Do we need a new organisation to do this?   Is there not a lot of this happening already?   Of course there is, and where there is good practice we want to celebrate and pluralise it.   The organisation is essentially a coalition of the willing, sharing and developing ideas through a website.

There will be a lively discussion about the Age Action Alliance at Age UK’s Agenda for Later Life conference on 8 March.   The initiative for the Alliance was taken by Age UK and the DWP, but it is ‘owned’ by the partners who step up to work together.   Too many good ideas have been lost as funding streams dried up, or the wilful individuals driving them moved on.   Society is facing unprecedented changes and tensions, but out of that we want a better deal for older people.

Find out more about Agenda for Later Life 2012

Find out more about the Age Action Alliance

Read the latest Age Action Alliance blog posts

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Hills Fuel Poverty Review

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 3 Comments

Professor John Hills is possibly the leading contemporary academic expert on poverty and inequality in Britain today.   He follows in the distinguished footsteps of Tawney, Titmus and Peter Thompson.   He accepted the challenge to lead the independent review into fuel poverty because, as he modestly says,

Julio Martinez

he was intrigued by the subject and wanted to understand it better.

The first part of his brief was “to consider fuel poverty from first principles:  to determine the nature of the issues at its core, including the extent to which fuel poverty is distinct from poverty, and the detriment it causes”.   Long term fuel poverty campaigners were fearful that by making this the question, Government ministers wanted to find an excuse to airbrush fuel poverty off the agenda and get off the hook of confronting the rapidly escalating numbers of households dropping into fuel poverty over the last five or six years.   Their fears are confounded in Hills’ Foreword to his report:  “That fuel poverty remains a serious problem is clear from the evidence we review”, he states.  

His report goes on to observe that households in or on the margins of poverty face costs stacking up an aggregate to £1.1bn more than typical households to keep warm, that those on low incomes cannot afford the investment to make their houses energy efficient – which is a key issue in the climate change and carbon reduction agenda, and crucially that living in cold homes has a series of effects on illness and mental health.   That last is the lead item on his chapter on the Impacts of Fuel Poverty.

For the rest of this typically thorough and comprehensive review (over 150 pages), the Hills team have looked at different ways of defining fuel poverty.   The current definition, which John Hills accepts, is based on the 2000 Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act, which states that “a person is to be regarded as living in fuel poverty if he is a member of a household living on a lower income in a home which cannot be kept warm at a reasonable cost”.   But if the devil is in the detail, this leads to further issues about defining low income, adequate warmth, and reasonable cost, and most of this Interim Report is probing around this area.  

 Hills props up several different methodologies to measure fuel poverty, all of which come up with big numbers, and some are higher and some lower than the current statistical measurements indicate.

 Hills will produce his final report in January, when he will put some recommendations forward, as well as analysing the impact of various policy prescriptions for the growing number of households in fuel poverty.  

 Read the full report

 Find out about our Spread the Warmth campaign

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