Fuel Poverty

Julie Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Julie Cooper (Burnley) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) for securing this debate on a truly shocking issue. I am shocked that we are still having to debate it, but clearly the Government are not as shocked as me. In my constituency, more than 5,000 households live in fuel poverty. That is 13.5% of all the households in Burnley and Padiham.

What does fuel poverty mean? There has been a lot of talk about it in recent times, but that is all it is: talk. I will tell the House what fuel poverty means. The bottom line is that it means being cold. It means someone spending so much of their income paying for fuel that there is not enough for all the other costs of living. It means misery. It means children coming home from school on a cold winter’s day to a cold house. It means old people deciding to spend the day in bed to save on fuel or skimping on food so that there is enough money to pay the gas bill. It means avoidable winter deaths. In the UK, an average of 65 people die each day whose death can attributed to a cold home. In the past three years, an average of 40 people have died each year in my constituency because they could not keep warm at home.

This weekend, people will die of cold in their own homes in the world’s fifth largest economy because they cannot afford to pay the high prices charged by energy companies. Although the cost of fuel to the Big Six energy companies has tumbled, they have not cut prices to match. Rather than make them do so, the Government have chosen to attack renewable power. It is calculated that every seven minutes in winter, an older person dies from the cold. Even relatively mild January temperatures increase heart attacks and strokes. Nearly two thirds of over-65s worry that they will not be able to pay their fuel bills and say that they are more likely to cut back on their energy usage than turn their heating up, even on the coldest of days.

It is not only the elderly, either. More than five million British households live in fuel poverty, and people have to devote more of their income to energy than in any other EU country except Estonia. That is a national scandal. In the past two years, the wholesale price of gas and oil has fallen dramatically, and meanwhile the Government seem content to sit back and let the energy companies maintain ridiculously high prices. As with most things, it is the poorest and most vulnerable households that feel the pain most. They are more likely to have low incomes, more likely to live in damp or poorly insulated houses and more likely to pay through the nose for their fuel courtesy of a prepayment meter. Reform is long overdue, and it is time the Government put a stop to the scandal of our time.