Author Archives: mervynkohler

Fuel poverty statistics

Posted on May 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

The latest annual report from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) covers the year 2011 – many energy price hikes and policy changes ago. The headline is that in England, the numbers of households in fuel poverty fell, from 3.3m in 2010 to 3.2m (and in the UK from 4.75m to 4.5m). These are the households which need to spend 10% or more of their income on energy to keep adequately warm, a definition we have all become accustomed to using. But DECC’s report has turned into a statistical soup, as it struggles to introduce a new definition of fuel poverty (which measures two different things), and reports anyway on a year long forgotten.

For what it’s worth, 2011 was mild (for both the winter months at the beginning and end), and this led to a fall in national domestic energy consumption. It was also the last year when the (now abolished) Warm Front programme was operating at full speed – the tax-funded grant programme targeted on low income households – so energy efficiency improvements were driving forward alongside the schemes offered by the energy supply companies to save energy.

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Posted in Campaigning, Consumers, Energy, Energy Bill Revolution, Money Matters, Spread the Warmth campaign

Tagged #EnergyBillRev, #energybills, #fuelpoverty, #spreadthewarmth, Age UK, Age UK blog, Ageing, ageing population, ageing society, DECC, Department for Energy and Climate Change, energy, Energy Bill Revolution, Energy Bill Revolution campaign, Energy Company Obligation, energy consumption, energy prices, fuel poverty, Health and Wellbeing, home energy efficiency, money and benefits, money matters, older people, Pension Credit, poverty, spread the warmth, Spread the Warmth campaign, the green deal, warm homes discount

Green Deal officially launched

Posted on January 31, 2013 | 1 Comment

The avowed ambition of the Green Deal is to offer everyone the opportunity to improve the energy efficiency of their home at no up-front cost, so enabling them to make it warmer and cheaper to run. Given that a third of our general housing stock is occupied by older households, Age UK obviously supports any initiative which will improve the quality and energy efficiency of our homes. That is particularly important because with the introduction of the Green Deal, all the existing programmes which have operated in this field in the past, such as Warm Front and the insulation programme CERT run by the energy companies, are now closed.

The design of the Green Deal invites the householder to call the Energy Saving Advice Service (on 0300 123 1234) to find a Green Deal Provider – a private sector company accredited and monitored by the Government. This Provider will then arrange for an Assessor to visit, and identify the relevant steps which could be taken (such as insulation, new boiler, radiator valves etc). The recommended work must meet the ‘golden rule’ that the cost of getting this work done would reduce the household’s spending on energy by a greater amount – so saving the householder money. A Green Deal Plan will then be prepared for the householder to agree to, an authorised Installer would then arrive to do the work, and a repayment plan will be devised which will be added to (the now reduced) electricity bill for an agreed period. In effect, the loan is a debt on the energy meter, not on the householder, and gets passed on if the house is bought and sold. Continue reading →

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Posted in Campaigning, Consumers, Energy, Energy Bill Revolution, Money Matters, Spread the Warmth campaign

Tagged #spreadthewarmth, Age UK, Age UK blog, Ageing, ageing society, consumer, consumer issues, energy, Energy Bill Revolution, Energy Bill Revolution campaign, Energy Bill Revolution coalition, Energy Company Obligation, energy consumption, energy efficiency, Energy Saving Advice Service, fuel poor, fuel poverty, Green Deal, Green Deal Plan, Green Deal Provider, home insulation, money matters, older people, spread the warmth, Spread the Warmth campaign

Excess Winter Deaths

Posted on December 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

In the winter of 2011/12, there were 24,000 Excess Winter Deaths in England and Wales (of which 21,700 were people over 65). By way of comparison, this shocking figure dwarfs the 1,715 people killed on roads in England and Wales in 2011.

True, the figures show a fall on last year, which in turn was a fall on the gristly winter of 2009/10. In fact, amongst the very vulnerable group of older people over 75, there was actually an increase. But the figures go up and down each year, and it is too early to see long term trends. They are simply far too high to feel anything but shame for this country’s deplorable record on supporting its older citizens to cope with the cold.

The problem of coping with the cold is primarily an issue of housing. Broadly speaking, the older the house the more likely it is to be thermally inefficient, and the more expensive it will be to keep adequately warm. The proportion of our housing stock built before 1919 is 22%: a further 17% was built between 1919 and 1944. The work on insulating these homes and equipping them with modern, energy efficient heating systems has been very slow, and we have watched the numbers in fuel poverty rising remorselessly over the last eight years as energy prices have spiralled upwards. Continue reading →

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Posted in Campaigning, Health, Income, Spread the Warmth campaign

Tagged #spreadthewarmth, Age UK, Age UK blog, Ageing, ageing society, cold weather, energy, energy efficiency, energy prices, excess winter deaths, fuel poverty, Green Deal, Health, home insulation, Later life, older people, spread the warmth, Spread the Warmth campaign, Warm Front, winter, winter deaths

Squeezing the rich pensioners

Posted on October 9, 2012 | 5 Comments

When Andrew Dilnot published his proposals on funding social care, he envisaged that a better, fairer system would require extra funding from public expenditure, and observed that since older people would be the principal beneficiaries, it would be preferable if this was raised by taxes which older people contribute to so that not all the cost would fall on the younger population.

Since then, a variety of ideas have been floated from a range of different quarters. But the discussion has also become conflated with views about intergenerational fairness as the Government tries to bear down on public spending, and comments about the ‘generosity’ of some universal benefits received by pensioners. There has long been a rumble of complaint that rich pensioners receive the Winter Fuel Payment. Frank Field waded in, arguing that before we find more money for older people, we should be looking at the poverty and the shortage of opportunities for children. The Lib Dem think tank CentreForum published a paper looking at the tax reliefs available to older people and their exemption from National Insurance if they are working over State Pension Age. Now, in the margins of the Lib Dem and Labour Conferences, the appropriateness of pensioners’ benefits has again bubbled up, though the Coalition Agreement specifically protects these till 2015. Continue reading →

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Posted in Income, Money Matters, Social care

Tagged #carecantwait, #careincrisis, #Dilnot, Age UK, Age UK blog, Ageing, ageing society, Andrew Dilnot, Dilnot Commission, IFS, Incomes, Institute for Fiscal Studies, money matters, older people, pensioners, social care, social care reform, universal benefits

Author Archives: mervynkohler

Fuel poverty statistics

Green Deal officially launched

Excess Winter Deaths

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