Fuel poverty brings medieval dread of winter to 21st century families

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/11/fuel-poverty-dread-winter-families

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Policy people talk a lot about fuel poverty, but the rather broad definition – anybody who spends more than 10% of their income on fuel – flattens it out. It becomes such a large cohort (nearly 7 million, according to a recent DECC report), that it sounds like just another unavoidable fact of life, like people who drink more three units a day. Netmums ran a survey of 1,000 families recently in which one in four said they had to choose between heating and eating, but the phrase is misleading – it sounds like skipping a meal to have the thermostat on a degree higher, whereas in fact, if the gas meter swallowed up £70 in a week, that would decimate your food budget. Really you're choosing between being too cold and starving.

Clearly this story runs quite a spectrum – there are people who spend just over 10% and people who spend 50% and people whose bills are so high that they have to turn the fridge off when the telly is on.

Rachel, in Coventry, only uses her cooker on special occasions and she and her partner have salad most nights. Louise, outside Chippenham, isn't on the gas mains because she lives in a rural area, so is locked into storage-heater hell where, if she wanted her house to be warm, it would cost £100 a week.

Eleanor, 26, lives with her parents in Wisbech and they don't put the heating on until her mother gets back from work. Eleanor is unemployed and her father is on disability living allowance. They spend the days under blankets and boil the kettle on the hob because it's 7p cheaper than with electricity.

Kirsty, in Edinburgh, has basically stopped using gas: "We use a little oil heater. It's like the olden days, really. We spend the evening in the living room, and then I move the heater into the hallway for when we go to bed."

Amanda, 47, who lives near Milton Keynes, keeps a bottle of water in her toilet cistern so that the tank doesn't have to fill every time. When her lodger goes away for the weekend, she turns the hot water off and just uses what she's got left in the tank.

Slow cookers, newspaper stuffed down every crevice, Calor gas canisters lugged from room to room, candles for warmth, going to bed before you're tired … Environmentalists will be pleased at the enforced reduction of energy usage (the nega-watts), even while I'm sure they wouldn't wish all the economy to be falling on people who are already ceaselessly economising everywhere else. Some of it might sound olde-worlde charming, to people who remember a time when nobody heated their whole house, when everyone just lived in one room until the summer. But the dread of winter feels more medieval than 60s.

Kirsty lives with her six-year-old son and used to work for an energy company – ironically, her bills only became a problem when she left her job to retrain, having become demoralised by spending every day on the phone to people who had a problem with their bills. "I saw the prices rise, and it was disheartening being in the call centre, on the frontline, with lots of people saying, this is too hard for us. A lot of the time, people would say, my meter's just eating my money."

People on a meter pay more, even though energy companies insist that the tariff is the same, because you get a 10% discount with direct debit. But there's a paradox here, as Alison – who works full-time as an administrator – explains: "They wouldn't change it over, because I didn't have a great credit rating because I was poor, which is why I was housed in the first place." So social housing often carries this inescapable fuel penalty. "If I put £5 in the [gas] meter, that will last two days. But if I have a bath, it won't last at all, so it's effectively £5 for a bath."

Louise, who lives with her three teenage children, says: "One of the kids will hop in behind me if I have a bath, because it is expensive."

Rachel uses the boiler as rarely as she can: "It's connected to the hot water, and obviously we can't afford a new boiler, so we basically have to put it on when we need a shower, and then it has to go off. If we kept it on to stay warm, the £10 we put in the meter would only last us a day and a half." She's off work with depression, but her ESA [the incapacity benefit] was recently stopped, because she turned up to the Atos assessment clean, and was therefore deemed to be functioning quite well. She's in an appeals process.

Nobody would let me use their surname, and one person wanted her first name changed, because "you don't tell anybody because it would be admitting that something's wrong. Not that anything is wrong. It's just sensible to save money." The shame, totally illogical, totally understandable, gets into your bones like the cold.