The Energy Bill Revolution

The Government released its new fuel poverty strategy today which aims to make fuel poor homes far more energy efficient but the strategy was strongly criticised by fuel poverty groups.

Ed Matthew, Director of the Energy Bill Revolution fuel poverty alliance said:

“The Government has at last recognised that energy efficiency is the only long term solution to end the fuel poverty crisis.  The UK has the oldest building stock in Europe and one of the most badly insulated. As a result we have one of the worse rates of fuel poverty and winter deaths.

But this strategy is so full of holes they will never plug the UK’s fuel poor homes.  The target to bring all fuel poor homes up to EPC Band C by 2030 is too far away and they have not committed to bringing homes up to this standard in one go, killing off the prospect of whole house retrofits and condemning millions of people to suffer the scourge of fuel poverty for yet another generation.  Also by saying the Government only has to do what is ‘reasonably practicable’  they don’t have to spend a penny on the programme. This makes the targets they are setting meaningless.

If the Government is serious about ending the fuel poverty scandal they need to make home energy efficiency a priority infrastructure investment and put the funding firmly in place to modernise the UK’s crumbling building stock once and for all.”

The Energy Bill Revolution is an alliance of over 190 charities, unions, health groups and businesses aiming to end fuel poverty. They are calling for:

1. All 6 million UK low income homes to be brought up to EPC Band C by 2025 with 2 million brought up to EPC C by 2020.
2. Home energy efficiency to be made a UK infrastructure investment priority
3. Carbon tax which consumers already pay on their energy bills to be used to provide long term funding for the programme

Although the Government claims today that fuel poverty has gone down since 2010 their latest official assessment of fuel poverty projected that fuel poverty had increased between 2013 and 2014.  Research by the Association for the Conservation for Energy for the Energy Bill Revolution has also shown that the Government’s energy efficiency policies are in free fall with the number of energy efficiency measures being installed having dropped by two-thirds between 2012 and 2014.

For more information please contact:

Ed Matthew, Director of the Energy Bill Revolution: 07827 1579(zero)6

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