An end to fuel poverty is affordable and achievable, but the opportunity is being lost in the continuing clamour for cuts, writes Alan Simpson
The current ‘energy debate’ is in danger of descending into little more than an unsavoury slanging match. Ed Miliband’s price freeze proposal was a brilliant opening ploy. But in the vacuum that followed, it looked more like a policy space the Labour Party didn’t know how to fill.
The moment called out for a radically different plan of what tomorrow’s energy market must look like. All it triggered, however, was a debate dominated by the political crazies.
Egged on by the Tabloid Tories, David Cameron’s resurgent right are blaming everything on ‘green’ taxes, and demanding their repeal. Behind a rallying cry of ‘Only pollution can save the poor’, Cameron’s crazies are calling for the deregulation of everything that might make a dirty industry clean up its act. The sad thing is they are getting away with it. Decarbonisation targets are being abandoned, zero-carbon homes are off the agenda, renewable energy is under attack, ‘Warm Home’ grants are replaced by Mickey Mouse ‘Green Deal’ loans... And now they even want to abandon their legal duty to end fuel poverty.
Annual cull
Britain has some of the poorest housing stock in Europe. Around five million households live in government-defined fuel poverty. Every 1 per cent increase in energy bills throws another 40,000 households over the fuel-poverty line. When this year’s figures are published, we will again see ‘excess winter deaths’ of 20,000–30,000 people.
This has become an annual cull: the cold-homes casualties that Britain tolerates because we lack a decent housing renewal policy. It is a scandal dressed up as a statistic.
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