No comfort for those in fuel poverty

Graham Parker* answers the door in his dressing gown. It is 10.30am, but if his Runcorn neighbours are thinking of the 57-year-old, ‘blinds down, living a life on benefits’, as George Osborne famously put it, they don’t know Mr Parker very well.

In fact, the neighbours are unlikely to make any such assumptions. Walking up the narrow path to Mr Parker’s front door, the lawn is perfectly manicured and prettily planted. Inside, the house is immaculate and almost entirely white; everything from the carpet to the curtains is in Mr Parker’s favourite colour. Cat ornaments are everywhere, adding to the homey aura - the more you look, the more you find, from the tiny porcelain cat on the windowsill to the draft excluder, which is shaped like a line of cats. But there is a problem. The house is very, very cold.

‘Just feel me hand,’ he says in a soft Liverpudlian accent. It’s very cold. There is little discernible difference between the temperature outside and the temperature inside the house.

In fact, the whole of the two-bedroom property where he has lived for 15 years is cold. Until a few days ago, he shared his home with his black cat, named Ovinnik after the Polish goddess - he shows me a shaky video of her. But Ovinnik died, aged 20, and now she is gone, Mr Parker lives alone.

He used to have an active career as a gardener, and before that as a barber. All that changed when he contracted HIV; subsequently, he was hit by a series of debilitating illnesses. Two years ago, he had a stroke. Now a typical day involves staying in bed, his only source of warmth an electric blanket.

Sustainable Housing is visiting Mr Parker with Michelle Melvin, the first affordable warmth officer to be appointed by his landlord, 53,500-home Riverside, which is one of the many social landlords with staff dedicated to energy efficiency advice (see box, overleaf: Found in translation). We are spending the day with Ms Melvin, as she visits a handful of the 9,000 tenants in her patch. Her job description is simple: to help tenants save money, and do what she can to ensure they can afford to heat their homes to a safe temperature.

Laura Bostock, Riverside’s financial inclusion project manager, explains. ‘We are committed to tackling fuel poverty in our neighbourhoods. Our investment in employing affordable warmth officers means that we can help people help themselves to reduce their energy bills, especially when budgets are tighter as a result of welfare reform cuts,’ she says.

Lowering bills
The job itself, however, is a tricky one: Riverside is one of the landlords that has been forced to call a halt to its plans to insulate 348 tenants’ homes in Liverpool in a £1.7 million project, because of recent changes to the subsidy system for this work, and the energy company obligation. Later, she’ll have to explain to another tenant, a dinner lady who is struggling to stay warm in her solid-wall home and has seen neighbours’ homes being covered in external wall insulation, that any such work on her house is likely to be several years down the road.

Ms Melvin’s day started a few hours ago, not far away in Riverside’s Runcorn office. She ploughs through some paperwork with a no-nonsense attitude, recording which tenants she has visited and how much money they have saved. Between April and mid-November 2013, Ms Melvin carried out

88 visits to 64 homes, and she estimates total savings of £24,211 - or an average of £375 for every tenant. One tenant saved more than £500, after getting rid of her pre-payment meters and switching energy supplier.

It is results like these which inspired Riverside to employ two more affordable warmth officers in the three-and-a-half years since Ms Melvin took up her post, a big change from her previous Riverside job in accounting.

She must also process her referrals by how urgent they are. Most of Ms Melvin’s referrals come from Riverside’s housing officers. In June 2013, all Riverside’s 54 housing officers were given a new target, to visit and survey every single one of the association’s tenants within three years. Housing officers who are concerned about tenants who can’t afford to heat their homes can make a referral to Ms Melvin by email. When a tenant is referred, she categorises them by urgency - at the moment, she has 35 ‘red’, or urgent referrals. Another 20 are ‘orange’ and need to be fitted in when she can, and 23 are ‘green’ - they can just be posted some advice.

Mr Parker is one of her ‘red’ cases.

Dangerously cold
Once we have been welcomed and sit down on his sofa, Ms Melvin turns down a cup of tea and gets straight to work. Digging into her bag she brings out a cardboard room thermometer. A healthy temperature, according to the NHS, is between 18C and 21C According to the Health and Safety Executive, a work environment should be at least 16C.

‘At the moment, it’s looking like it’s 12 degrees in here,’ Ms Melvin says. ‘It’s quite a serious health risk. Nine degrees [poses the risk of] hypothermia and death. It really is quite serious that you’re living in these cold conditions. We need to try to get it warmer for you.’

‘This week I put £10 on the gas and £10 on the electric,’ Mr Parker explains - which has been his regular pattern for years. But flicking through Mr Parker’s bills, Ms Melvin notices that last year his gas use plummeted dramatically. In 2012, he used 19,480 units of gas, but in 2013 this dropped precipitously by more than 6,000 units. ‘What happened?’ she asks sympathetically.

‘It’s because I’m scared to use it, you see,’ Mr Parker admits.

‘Sometimes I get that exhausted, I get in my bed, the heating’s on and I fall asleep until the next day,’ he explains.

‘We’ve given you controlled times on the boiler so you will never ever fall asleep with the heating on,’ Ms Melvin reassures him.

‘Great, that’s great,’ says Mr Parker.

Expensive system
One of the reasons for Mr Parker’s growing fear of his heating system turns out to be that his gas fire was recently taken out for safety reasons and replaced with an electric one, but it’s more expensive and doesn’t feel as warm. He is worried about how much it will cost to use the central heating instead.

Just like most of the struggling tenants she visits, Mr Parker is on a pre-payment meter for both gas and electricity - which inevitably means he is paying more to heat and light his home than someone paying by direct debit. To get to Mr Parker’s electricity and gas meters, which he has to access to top-up, he must move his sofa out the way, stoop down and climb into a cupboard.

In fact, Mr Parker has £51.73 on his gas meter, and about the same on his electricity meter - a much better position than many of the tenants that Ms Melvin visits, who she explains normally have just a few pounds of credit.

Ms Melvin raises the possibility of removing the pre-payment meter and installing a regular one but Mr Parker isn’t convinced. ‘It’s been like this for years so I’m not going to change.’

Ms Melvin explains later that many tenants are worried about being able to budget properly if their pre-payment meter is removed.

Nonetheless, there are a number of very practical things that Ms Melvin does immediately - such as phoning British Gas to make sure the tenant’s energy company has him down on its risk register - meaning if the gas or electricity goes down, the company is aware he needs to be reconnected as soon as possible.

Heating experiment
Ms Melvin has a plan to help Mr Parker get comfortable with the heating system. First, she puts the central heating on its optimum settings, 65C - standing over the boiler with the tenant to ensure he understands how to use it. Normally she would also set the temperature controls on the radiators and the room thermostat - the dial on the wall, which remotely work the boiler so it is producing enough heat to get to the optimum temperature, before turning off.

Unfortunately, Mr Parker’s home is not equipped with either; Ms Melvin says this is unusual for a Riverside tenant.

Then she turns on the boiler for one hour, and using the read-out from the pre-payment meter can explain exactly how much it costs Mr Parker to have the heating on for 60 minutes.

Ms Melvin’s job is not just to explain how Mr Parker should use his central heating, but also to give him confidence that it won’t cost more than he can afford from his tiny budget.

Without a thermostat on the wall, Mr Parker has been struggling to use the boiler in the best way. Instead of putting it on a timer, he has been turning the temperature on the boiler down to zero. Ironically, Michelle discovers that even on this very low setting, the boiler wasn’t completely off, and was still ‘eating a bit of money’, she explains.

Having set the heating up for this experiment, Ms Melvin goes back to her task - in the next 60 minutes, she helps Mr Parker to switch to a different tariff. She confirms that he has applied to British Gas for the government-backed warm home discount scheme, and explains how this works - although Mr Parker applied last year, it could still be a while before the money comes through. He will be sent a letter with a barcode that he must scan when he goes to top up his meter. After a few top-ups, the £135 discount should appear on his meter.

Luckily, Mr Parker is with British Gas; later that day, Ms Melvin will have to explain to another tenant that she might have applied too late to receive the discount from Scottish Power, because the pot of money set aside by that energy company has already run out. While pensioners qualify automatically, each energy supplier has its own eligibility criteria for people outside this group.

Ms Melvin pulls out one energy-saving gadget after another. A hot water bottle is, mercifully, adorned with a furry white cover. ‘It’s my favourite colour!’ Mr Parker enthuses. A handwarmer and a blanket goes down well, even though they aren’t white. A couple of energy-saving lightbulbs come out of her bag, but Ms Melvin doesn’t install them as Mr Parker already has some in. A bag of salt will come in handy if it snows or gets icy.

And, most impressively, an electricity monitor. After clipping one half of the monitor to one of the wires going into Mr Parker’s electricity meter, Ms Melvin sets this device up quickly and demonstrates how it works - displaying exactly how much electricity the tenant is using in pounds per hour. Turning the lights on and off makes the numbers go up and down. Boiling the kettle, one of the most electricity-hungry devices, sends the rate shooting up - although Ms Melvin says not to be too worried, as the price is per hour - and no one boils a kettle for a solid hour.

Positive impact
Eventually, it is time to check on the gas meter. The results are in: it costs Mr Parker 61p an hour to run his central heating.

‘That’s not bad is it? It doesn’t sound bad,’ he says. Armed with this new information, Mr Parker asks Ms Melvin to reset the timer on the boiler again, giving him three hours heat a day, instead of just two.

It’s time to leave. Another glance at the room thermometer shows that the temperature has risen to about 16C. It’s a big improvement although my hands are still stiff with cold and I’ve had to stop writing notes.

Later, in the car, Ms Melvin says: ‘My feet are freezing. Sometimes when you go to cold houses, at the end of the day it’s gone to the bone.’

But Ms Melvin is pleased about the impact of this visit on Mr Parker’s living standards. ‘We’ve done as much as we possibly can,’ she replies. ‘Even just having it on three hours a day is substantially different than having to confine yourself to bed to stay warm.’

Ms Melvin wouldn’t normally do a follow-up visit with Mr Parker but she gives him her phone number and, in a forthright moment, she admits: ‘I’m a bit miffed’ and says she will call him in a few months to check in.

‘For him to not have a room thermostat or thermostatic radiator valves, he’s slipped through the net,’ she adds.

Will it be possible to get these fitted? ‘I’m hoping so,’ she replies. ‘We’ve got budgetary restrictions on our repairs this year, because of the welfare reforms. Last year I was able to ring our call centre straight away and say “can we have a room thermostat fitted”. I’m not allowed to this year. I just have to put them on a wishlist - if there’s any budget left at the end of the year, we’ll go out there and do it.’

*Name and identifying details have been changed

To read more about fuel poverty click here.