Ralph Hartley, Policy Officer, The Poverty Alliance
Last week the Scottish Government predicted that the latest rise in everyone’s energy bills will plunge 110,000 more Scots into fuel poverty. This is yet another blow in what has become an enduring crisis of affordability in our energy system, a crisis which hits low income and rural and island households in Scotland hardest. Nadiia, a member of our Taking Action on Rural Poverty (TARP) Citizen Panel perfectly encapsulates the injustices of this in her photograph and its caption below. At the moment, the very communities who generate our renewables wealth continue to face choices between heating and eating.
This is why the Poverty Alliance supports Fuel Poverty Action’s Make Green Fair campaign,which demands that the UK government makes the changes needed to ensure everyone has access to cheap, clean energy from the wind and sun.
This week, Make Green Fair handed in a petition with 12,000 signatories to the Department for Energy and Net Zero. Amongst the nine principles for a fair energy system it sets out was: “affordable pricing that delivers the benefits of renewables to households”.
Our TARP Citizens Panels have consistently told us about the injustices faced by rural and island communities in Scotland when it comes to the price paid for energy. These injustices are baked into our current system. If you live rurally you’re more likely to use electricity or heating oil to heat your home, but heating oil requires large upfront payments that are difficult to budget for and prices are not regulated. Meanwhile, electricity costs more per unit than gas. In fact, despite being energy rich and hosting much of the UK’s renewables generation, rural and island communities experience some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.
This makes the changes Make Green Fair sets out to create affordable pricing so important, including breaking the connection between the price of electricity generated by renewables and expensive fossil fuels. At the Poverty Alliance, we also want to see a Social Tarrif, or equivalent approach, which would reduce the cost of energy for people on low incomes or those – like people living rurally – who have unavoidably higher energy usage.
Make Green Fair also calls for affordable heat pumps and rooftop solar which should guarantee savings to residents. Our Citizens Panels, and our partnership work with ALIenergy in Argyll and Bute, has shown that the money the government spends on making homes more energy efficient, or able to use cleaner heating systems like air source heat pumps doesn’t necessarily result in lower bills for households. It’s vital that this changes so we can fully align the crucial mission to decarbonise our homes with the fight to end fuel poverty.
In Scotland, the powers to do this sit with the Scottish Government and that’s why we’re calling on them to ensure retrofit and clean heating schemes deliver genuine bill savings through a ‘Warm Homes Guarantee’. This would ensure that any publicly funded or subsidised installation would deliver verifiable improvements in warmth, safety and energy savings – or be put right at no cost to the resident.
Crucially, this guarantee will need to be delivered with the support of high-quality, independent and local advice from organisations like Ali-Energy. This will require long -term, stable funding for these services to reflect the cost of delivering intensive support, and the additional costs of delivering in rural and island communities.
We have the resources to end the injustice of fuel poverty in Scotland. It’s time to Make Green Fair.
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