Fuel poverty cut at stroke of pen

The coalition government has come up with a radical way to cut fuel poverty — they have come up with a new definition.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said a new definition that cut the official number of “fuel poor” families from 3.5 million to 2.5 million was being introduced to ensure help is “targeted at those who need it most”.

But campaigners at the Fuel Poverty Action Group said the government had “masked an escalating cold homes crisis” by simply redefining the problem.

Under the old measure, any family spending more than 10% of their income on gas and electricity was judged as being “fuel poor”.

The new measure from DECC classes fuel poverty as a home where “the total income is below the poverty line, and energy costs are higher than typical”.

The government has also introduced amendments to the Energy Bill to set a new target for fuel poverty.

The current target, set out in the 2000 Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act, is concerned with eradication. But the coalition has given up on that as “the wrong type of target to focus on given the nature of the problem”.

Instead it has proposed a target that will “focus on improving the energy efficiency of the homes of the fuel poor, providing for a more sensible measure of progress in tackling the problem”.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/fuel-poverty-a-framework-for-future-action