Back to news articles.
Central heating blues
At least one in five homes in Nottingham are classified as being in ‘fuel poverty.’ Although other parts of the East Midlands have slightly higher figures – the Derbyshire Dales tops the regional league table with 22.5% - in Nottinghamshire only Bassetlaw beats Nottingham for having so many households in fuel poverty, which is defined as having to spend more than 10% of your income on fuel to keep your home at a ‘satisfactory’ warmth level.
Although these aren’t figures that are widely bandied about over the work water cooler, fuel poverty – and attempts to alleviate it –is in fact a stated big driver of local and national housing policy and one that is also closely intertwined with the realms of climate change policy and low-carbon economics.
At the top level the Government’s looming Green Deal is an attempt to lift millions of homes in Britain out of fuel poverty by persuading home owners (and possibly landlords) to upgrade their draughty old brick piles with PV, better boilers and insulation. Meanwhile, in authorities such as Nottingham, where 21% of homes are in fuel poverty, two flagship PV installation programmes for the city’s council houses are officially regarded as means of targeting the problem head on by cutting tenants’ electricity bills by around £100 per year.
Trouble is, fuel poverty is getting worse. And just as it gets worse the Government has slashed the budget for Britain’s independent energy advisory service, the Energy Saving Trust, with the result that advice centres have closed and merged. The Nottingham advice centre closed in April, losing around ten staff, merging with the Birmingham centre to offer a single service now covering the whole of the Midlands. Losing a stated 75% of its funding, and with DECC funding ending completely next year, the trust is seeking to become a social enterprise with charitable status. Meanwhile, near record numbers of households have been falling into fuel poverty.
We know this because the figures are contained in DECC’s recent Annual Report on Fuel Poverty Statistics 2011, which shows that the number of households in fuel poverty was an estimated 5.5 million in 2009, the highest level since 1996. The graph dipped down from 1996, reaching a low in 2003 and 2004 but then climbed inexorably to its present level. There was a further small increase projected in 2011. The reason for this climb has been a combination of low household income, household fuel inefficiency and fuel price hikes which have pushed electricity prices up by 75% and gas by 122% since 2004. The fuel poverty rate for the East Midlands now stands at around 21% (the West Midlands has the highest rate) although to find the breakdown for individual local authorities you have to dig deep to locate that well-known spreadsheet Subregional Fuel Poverty Date for 2008, where the latest figures for Nottingham, Bassetlaw, Mansfield etc lurk. The warmest district in the region is Blaby in Leicestershire; the warmest in Nottinghamshire is Rushcliffe. As well as the two PV schemes in Nottingham, the local fuel poverty issue has been addressed by the Nottingham Energy Partnership, which administers the Warm Zone home insulation scheme on behalf of the city council and Scottish and Southern Energy.
Back to news articles.