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2.3 million households in England are living in fuel poverty, new report suggests


Around 2.3 million households in England are currently living in fuel poverty, although over 1 million households who cannot afford to heat their home to a comfortable level are in work, a recent paper published by Policy Exchange has been able to reveal.

The think tank’s latest report suggests that 10% of all households in England are in fuel poverty – but this rises to 19% of households living in private rented accommodation.

Half of all fuel poor households (49%) in England are in work – or just over 1.1 million households. Furthermore, the report also found that households in the most energy inefficient properties would have to spend up to £1,700 extra a year to heat their homes to a suitable level (between 18 and 20 degrees Celsius).

The problem is most severe in older, detached properties, particularly those in rural areas off the gas grid. Despite some recent improvement, the UK’s housing stock remains woefully inefficient compared to other European countries.

The report highlights flaws with the current fuel poverty strategy. The government target is to move all fuel poor homes in England to a ‘Band C’ energy efficiency rating by 2030, at an estimated cost of £1.2billion a year. However, the government is spending less than half of what is required (£490million a year) leading to a £700million per year funding gap.

Energy efficiency subsidies should be more focused on fuel poor households. At present, only 33% of fuel poverty funding actually benefits the fuel poor. Refocusing the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme on fuel poor households would raise £375million a year to allocate to fuel poor households.

Significant savings can only be truly achieved when implementing a solution designed to optimize energy consumption across the board, whether we’re talking about electricity or gas.

This is exactly where HeatingSave system might prove its worth, since our solution allows customers to achieve immediately savings of up to 30%+ on their energy bills. This is achieved by optimizing the energy consumption levels within any building with the help of an advanced heat-loss algorithm that creates a specific profile for any building and based on that, switches heating on later if its warm and off earlier if its cold.

It also automatically adjusts your boiler depending on how warm it is outside – save up to another 10%.

Furthermore, the system also offers an advanced automatic occupancy detection system that allows the temperature to reduce to a background when areas are not used and quickly brought up to temperature when they are being used.

If you’d like to find out more about the HeatingSave Building Energy Management System, then simply contact our dedicated product team, they’ll help you get all the necessary information and answer all of your queries.

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