On 25 November 2015 a crowd of pensioners, single mothers, asylum seekers and others were ejected from the lobby of the House of Commons. Fuel Poverty Action, a self-help and campaigning group, had come to ‘warm up’ and speak out about fuel poverty: it was announced that day that 15,000 people had died the previous winter because they could not afford to heat their homes.1
While the ‘excess winter death’ toll can rise and fall, reflecting many different factors, fuel poverty itself has dramatically increased under austerity. This crisis has been concealed. Households used to be defined as fuel poor if they had to spend more than 10 per cent of their income on fuel (itself an inadequate measure). But in 2013, the government changed the definition.2 The new ‘Low Income High Costs’ definition counts only households whose fuel costs to keep warm put them below the official poverty line, and are also above average.
The ‘above average’ component of the new definition means the statistic hardly changes from year to year. It also means that any action now is targeted only at the most vulnerable households. Much money and time are spent on identifying the ‘fuel poor’ to ensure that help is not wasted on those who are just about managing.3
Fuel poverty costs the NHS £3.6 million per day, £27,000 for each local health trust.4 And that is on top of the cost to the patients, who suffer from strokes, pneumonia and depression as a result of fuel poverty, and the cost to the people who care for them, unpaid. Meanwhile, children, ill half the winter in cold damp homes, miss school (or go in, sick, to keep warm) and fall behind (see Chapter 7 by Joanna Mack). Adults miss work or lose jobs. Students drop out of college. Relationships break up.
In this chapter we examine just a few examples of the violence we see, and point to how people are fighting the energy suppliers, the government and landlords who perpetrate it.
Anthony Waters, aged 48, committed suicide after British Gas workmen turned up at his family shop with a warrant to disconnect his energy supply. Warrant officer David Pickard told the inquest:
He clearly felt he should have been given more time to pay. He said ‘You will have to do it’, referring to us de-energising the electricity supply. But he was getting more anxious and said ‘I will hang myself’. I thought it was just a throw away comment, an idle threat. In my line of work I hear people say it quite regularly and think nothing of it.
Talking to the Daily Mirror, Mr Waters’ father Keith, 87, said:
I’m sure they could have arranged for another payment scheme if things were getting that bad. I don’t understand why British Gas had to send three men to his shop without any warning. Where is their humanity?5
Where, indeed? David Pickard, a worker doing his – horrible – job, probably had sleepless nights, along with the lady in the office who gave ‘the final say on whether we de-energise or walk away’ after Mr Waters had phoned his friends and come up with just £1000. It speaks volumes that such desperation is normal in Britain: ‘I hear people say it quite regularly’. In time, perhaps, some frontline workers will follow the example of members of the Utility Workers Union of Southern California, who in 1980 organised against being forced to commit violence, and established that they would not cut customers off if anyone on the property was sick, elderly or a young child. In France, ‘Robin Hood’ EDF engineers and electricians will often refuse company instructions to cut vulnerable people off, or return to a home to re-connect a disconnected supply.
Behind the violence of those frontline workers stands the violence of the corporations themselves, in particular the Big Six energy companies which still hold 80–90 per cent of the UK fuel market. Centrica, the owner of British Gas, recorded profits of £1 billion the year Anthony Waters died. The corporation’s purpose is profit, and its executives’ legal duty is to its shareholders. In a world where regulation is a dirty word and ‘austerity’ trumps ‘humanity’, energy prices have soared. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) reports that between 2004 and 2014 ‘Average domestic electricity prices rose by around 75% in real terms, and average domestic gas prices rose by around 125%.’6 It further points out that ‘[i]n 2015, the upwards trend halted, with electricity prices roughly flat and gas prices falling nearly 5%’7 – but this occurred during a period when the price of oil, a major component of the company’s costs, was plunging, at one point by 70 per cent. The CMA found that customers had been paying £1.4 billion a year more than they would in a fully competitive market.8
In 2016 a woman – let’s call her Sandra Blackstock – wrote to us,
I was awoken today by two British Gas meter fitters. They had a warrant to put a gas meter OUTSIDE my bungalow. They could plainly see that I had a walker and a crutch and a wheelchair. They started asking the neighbours if I could walk ok and telling them I how much I owed ... they left me screaming and crying and having an asthma attack. When the gas goes I will have no gas at all. I haven’t got a card to get any more and I can’t go outside to put any in or see if I have any credit ... Is there anything I can do? They have frauded the court because they never informed the judge that I was disabled and ill.
A Fuel Poverty Action British Gas shareholder read out Ms Blackstock’s letter at Centrica’s Annual General Meeting.9
It is common for a prepayment meter (PPM) to be forced on customers who go into arrears.10 It is illegal to disconnect vulnerable customers in winter. This applies to pensioners living alone or families with young children. But with a PPM you ‘self-disconnect’: with a quiet little click, the money runs out and everything goes dead. This violence is compounded by the misappropriation of hundreds of millions of pounds from PPM customers. In 2015 and 2016, the CMA acknowledged that the 4 million households on prepayment meters – usually the poorest customers – were paying £260–£320 more for fuel per year than people with bank orders for direct debit.11
Without fuel you can’t cook,12 bathe, watch TV, go online or charge your phone. You can’t even keep the lights on. Nor the freezer, or even the fridge.
David Clapson, an unemployed ex-soldier, was diabetic, and used his fridge to keep his insulin chilled (if insulin gets warm it denatures and cannot be used). He had worked 29 years, had been a carer for his mother, and was training and applying for work, when in July 2013, he died. His sister, Gill Thompson, brought his case to Leigh Day solicitors, who wrote in a press release:
David died ... from fatal diabetic ketoacidosis which occurs when [there is] a severe lack of insulin ... The Department for Work and Pensions had sanctioned him for a month, leaving him unable to afford to top up his electricity key and unable to afford food ... after he failed to attend two appointments. In a letter to David’s MP, the DWP stated they were ‘aware Mr Clapson was insulin dependent’ … We hope that these submissions will show the Coroner that there is a reason to suspect that David died an unnatural death and that an investigation should be opened with a view to holding a full Inquest into the circumstances of David’s death.13
This is urgent: like the utility companies, the DWP, and their employees, hold the power of life and death over vulnerable people.
Nowhere has the sheer perverseness of UK government policy been more apparent than in their policy on energy. The good news is that, worldwide, renewable energy – using free and limitless power from the sun, wind, waves and tides – is rapidly taking hold. Renewables, and the huge potential savings in energy efficiency, mean that in the future we should all be able to heat our homes at low cost both to ourselves and to the climate. There are determined battles going on, on many fronts, which could dramatically reduce, or eliminate, fuel poverty.
The best long-term way of keeping homes warm is by insulation and other energy saving measures, which also protect the climate. But state programmes like the popular Warm Front, which provided insulation to approximately 2.3 million homes,14 were replaced by a money-lending scheme, the Green Deal, which never got off the ground.15 New, much smaller schemes to reduce demand for energy have been handed over to the firms that sell energy. Unsurprisingly, in 2015 the Association for Conservation of Energy documented an 80 per cent cut since 2012 in help to make cold homes more energy efficient.16 Tighter energy efficiency requirements for new build homes were scrapped in 2015 and developers then redrew plans, already in the pipeline, to save themselves a bit of money. Yet, with the new insulation schemes paid for by a charge passed on to customers,17 ‘green measures’ are blamed for high bills.
Meanwhile, the cost of renewable energy is plummeting. The UK has some of the best access to wind, waves and tide of any country in the world, and a strong renewables industry was developing, when the government – in the name of cutting costs to ‘hard-working families’ – pulled the rug out from beneath it with £5–600 million worth of cuts.18 David Cameron called it ‘green crap’.19
Instead, state support has promoted nuclear power, with its huge costs and huge risks; the consumer – and the tax payer – are expected to pick up the tab.20 Electricity prices promised to potential investors in Hinkley C nuclear power station are double what electricity will cost from other sources, and opposition is intense.
The government’s other favoured energy source is fracking, touted as an economic boon, but known to release not only carbon dioxide but the still more potent greenhouse gas methane, as well as polluting air and the water table. Fuel poverty is often used as an argument for fracking – but both the government and the companies hoping to frack have had to acknowledge that it would not significantly dent the price of UK fuel. Local and national popular opposition to fracking has been determined (see Chapter 16 by Will Jackson, Helen Monk and Joanna Gilmore) and after six years is still undefeated, leading the government to abolish the need for local planning consent.21
Government polling in April 2016 showed public support for fracking at 19 per cent.22 In stark contrast, renewable power was supported by 81 per cent of the public, with only 4 per cent opposing it. And 68 per cent of the UK public say energy companies should be publicly owned23 – a preference that is now giving birth to new non-profit municipal energy suppliers.
Housing policies that force more and more tenants into cold, damp, mouldy flats, with private landlords they do not dare to challenge, are another key cause of fuel poverty. We are now seeing, in addition, major problems with schemes in social housing, and privately owned homes on regenerated estates, where communal or district heating is replacing individual boilers or heaters. New ‘Heat Networks’, heavily promoted and subsidised by the government,24 have the potential to bring down both bills and carbon emissions – but they are currently unregulated monopolies. Unable to switch suppliers, residents can face horrendous bills and unreliable service; many are going cold as a result.
Even renewables, when installed and run without accountability to consumers, can lead to a similar situation. In Cumbria, Longtown Action for Heat has for years been confronting Riverside Housing Association which in 2012 imposed solar power on their tenants, with no escape clause. At the launch of Fuel Poverty Action’s Energy Bill of Rights in the House of Commons (October 2014), Paul Dill described how solar panels had been placed on a north-facing roof, boilers were too big for the flats, with no room for essential components, and other major failings of design and installation. All the profit from the solar panels goes to the housing association, despite them having been funded by a government grant, while tenants’ bills doubled or in some cases quadrupled.25
Public outrage at being deprived of heat, or going hungry to pay the bills, runs deep in the UK. A change in government policies, at no net cost, could save or transform lives. Instead, austerity governments since 2010 have overseen the expansion of low waged, insecure employment and benefit cuts, and have cut the libraries and day centres where people go to keep warm and the advice centres and legal aid which defended their entitlements. They have legislated to sell off social housing in favour of private landlords, and have organised energy policy around profit instead of survival. As we write, Theresa May is questioning the justice of energy prices, and poll-scarred governments worldwide are jettisoning the rhetoric of austerity itself. But only the rhetoric. The reversal of austerity’s lethal priorities is long overdue.
Websites were last accessed 4 November 2016.
1. Office of National Statistics provide yearly ‘Excess Winter Deaths’; the World Health Organization estimates that one third of these are due to cold homes. Fuel Poverty Action has pioneered the ‘Warm Up’ as a gentle form of direct action based on the principle that if you can’t afford to heat your home, you have a right to go into any public building and collectively get warm there.
2. In March 2016, analysis carried out for Panorama suggested that about 13 million people would be classed as fuel poor if the definition had stayed the same. Under the new definition, the number was around 5 million.
3. For example, the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) which obliges the larger energy suppliers to help lower income households insulate their homes and otherwise improve their energy efficiency is to be changed in 2017 to a scheme focusing on the fuel poor, see www.energy-uk.org.uk/policy/energy-efficiency/energy-companies-obligation.html
4. In 2014, a pilot project in Sunderland offered people insulation, double glazing and efficient boilers – on prescription. Following the pilot, GP visits and outpatient appointments plummeted, see www.independent.co.uk/money/four-million-childen-in-fuel-poverty-which-costs-the-nhs-27000-a-day-a6896906.html
5. Jessica Best, ‘Desperate shopkeeper facing huge energy bill hanged himself moments after British Gas cut electricity supply’, Mirror, 30 September 2014, available at: www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/desperate-shopkeeper-facing-huge-energy-4348990
6. Competition and Markets Authority, Energy Market Investigation: Summary of Final Report, London: CMA, 2016, available at: http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/576c23e4ed915d622c000087/Energy-final-report-summary.pdf. In 2015, the CMA found that 95 per cent of customers were overpaying for their energy, and that earnings at the Big Six increased tenfold in the years from 2007 to 2013, with higher margins taken from loyal customers on standard tariffs. The final 2016 report marked a retreat from its expected conclusions and recommendations. The Guardian, 23 June 2016 commented: ‘The CMA launched its inquiry amid widespread anger that the large power companies were overcharging customers by £1.7 bn a year. There were calls for the owner of British Gas, Centrica, and the rest of the big six to be forcibly broken up and energy prices capped. But in the subsequent 24 months the market watchdog has been in almost constant retreat, under relentless pressure from the big six and after a significant fall in commodity costs filtered through to lower household energy bills.’
7. Competition and Markets Authority, Energy Market Investigation, p. 5.
8. Competition and Markets Authority, ‘CMA publishes final energy market reforms’, Press release, 24 June 2016, available at: www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-publishes-final-energy-market-reforms
9. Video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rgbjf8djlo&feature=youtu.be
10. In fear of debt, some people want a PPM, but most do not. With a court warrant, your home can be broken into and a meter forcibly installed. With determination and good advice, it is usually possible to avoid this. See Fuel Poverty Action, In Trouble with Your Energy Company? A Mini-guide to Your Rights, 2nd edn 2017, available at: fuelpovertyaction.org.uk
11. Ofgem’s Standard Licence Condition 27.2A says any extra charge must reflect additional costs – but this is ignored. In 2016, the CMA capped the extra charge on PPM users, but these customers – who pay in advance, guaranteed – will still pay much more than customers who pay by direct debit (see Fuel Poverty Action’s consultation response at www.gov.uk/cma-cases/energy-market-investigation).
12. ‘Kettle packs’ are now given out at food banks for people who can’t afford to cook a hot meal. But some can’t boil a kettle. And many have times when they cannot even choose between heating and eating: they can do neither.
13. Leigh Day, ‘Submissions from lawyers call for inquest into death of ex-soldier who died following benefits sanction’, 31 October 2016, available at: www.leighday.co.uk/News/News-2016/October-2016/Submissions-from-lawyers-call-for-inquest-into-dea
14. C. Watson, and P. Bolton, Warm Front Scheme, House of Commons Library Science and Environment Social and General Statistics Series, London: House of Commons, 2015.
15. A very useful history of this field is available at: www.nea.org.uk/the-challenge/fuel-poverty-energy-efficiency-timeline/
16. From 1.74 million a year to 340,000 now. See Association for the Conservation of Energy, ‘Home energy efficiency 2010 2020’, Briefing note 1, March 2016, London, available at: www.ukace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ACE-briefing-note-2016-03-Home-energy-efficiency-delivery-2010-to-2020.pdf
17. Notably ECO, see endnote 3.
18. Department of Energy and Climate Change, ‘Changes to renewables subsidies’, Press release, 17 December 2015, available at: www.gov.uk/government/news/changes-to-renewables-subsidies
19. George Eaton, ‘No. 10 refuses to deny Cameron call to “get rid of all the green crap”’, New Statesman, 21 November 2013, available at: www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/11/no-10-refuses-deny-cameron-call-get-rid-all-green-crap
20. In January 2012, the campaign group Energy Fair, and others, filed a formal complaint with the European Commission over alleged unlawful state aid in the form of subsidies for the nuclear power industry, in breach of EU competition law. A summary of the case is available at: www.mng.org.uk/gh/private/forms_of_support_for_nuclear_power.pdf
21. Adam Vaughn, ‘Government will step in if councils don’t fast-track fracking applications’, Guardian, 13 August 2013, available at: www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/13/government-will-step-in-if-councils-dont-fast-track-fracking-applications
22. Adam Vaughn, ‘UK support for fracking hits new low’, Guardian, 28 April 2016, available at: www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/28/uk-support-for-fracking-hits-new-low
23. Details of the poll are published on the YouGove site at: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/11/04/nationalise-energy-and-rail-companies-say-public/
24. Through the Heat Networks Investment Project and the Renewable Heat Incentive.
25. A report by Avoca consulting engineers in December 2013 found ‘inherent design issues that contradict the requirement for providing efficient, effective and economical heating to the properties’ and ‘it is evident that the energy costs for each of the properties surveyed has increased over and above the normal expected rate’. See Jenny Brown, ‘Major flaws found in heating systems at homes in Cumbrian town’, The Cumberland News, 18 July 2014, available at: www.cumberlandnews.co.uk/news/Major-flaws-found-in-heating-systems-at-homes-in-Cumbrian-town-7a01a312-b85a-4502-97b0-c5322c9ae3f2-ds