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People in rural areas should not suffer fuel poverty as a direct result of their remote location
If a house-hold can’t achieve temperatures needed to maintain health and comfort on an expenditure of less than 10% of their income they are define as living in fuel poverty. The Government’s statutory commitment to eradicating fuel poverty by 2016 should benefit the old, children, and those who are disabled or have a long-term illness that are especially vulnerable to the effects of fuel poverty. The main cause of fuel poverty in the UK is a combination of poor energy efficiency in homes, low incomes and high energy prices. While people living in both rural and urban areas are subject to many of the same causes of fuel poverty there are particular challenges specific to rural locations.
Energy efficiency is lower in rural areas than in urban areas. According to data collected by the Centre for Sustainable Energy a third of rural homes have solid walls, compared with 26% in urban areas. Solid walls have very low energy efficiency and insulating them costs significantly more than insulating cavity walled homes. Government grants are available to improve home energy efficiency, such as Warm Front, but up-take remains low in rural areas. Increasing awareness and encouraging application for such schemes could help improve energy efficiency and reduce the percentage of home income spent on heating bills.
The Warm Front Scheme is the Government's main grant-funded programme for tackling fuel poverty. It installs energy efficiency measures, including central heating and insulation, into vulnerable private sector households, up to the value of £4000. To qualify for the scheme applicants must be in receipt of other Government benefits. However in rural villages and hamlets the take up of benefits tends to be lower than market towns or urban areas. One of the possible reasons for low benefit take-up in rural areas is the tendency of rural residents to be stoic about difficulty rather than suffer the perceived stigma of accepting benefits. The Department of Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department of Work and Pensions need to ensure that rural areas are taking up eligible benefits which can help raise household income and tackle fuel poverty.
The price of oil reached $139 a barrel in 2008 significantly increasing the price of road and domestic heating fuels. The Government responded by increasing the Winter Fuel Payment (a payment given to help people aged 60 or over with winter fuel costs) for the 2008/09 winter period to help the most vulnerable cope with price hikes. Energy companies were very quick to increase fuel prices for customers during the oil price spike, but it took them longer to pass on the benefits of lower fuel costs when the price of oil fell again. In the future, energy companies should be held to account if they don’t pass on the decreases in oil prices to their customers in the form of lower fuel prices in a reasonable time-frame.
Home connection to mains gas is also significantly lower in rural areas (58%) compared to urban areas (91.3%), meaning many rural house holds have to buy more expensive alternative fuels and can’t benefit from dual fuel discounts offered by energy companies.
Ofgem is investigating incentivising companies to provide connections to deprived communities currently off the gas network. Once Ofgem completes the guidelines under which the Gas Distribution Networks can take this forward, and if Networks respond to incentivisation, more communities will hopefully benefit from increased access to mains gas and lower fuel bills. |
Our countryside is a national treasure admired around the world but it is also a home and workplace for millions of us. Yet those who live and work there can be forgiven for feeling at times that it does not receive the political support it deserves.
