Fuel Poverty
I’ve recently been working on a response for the DTI’s current consultation: Our Energy Challenge - Securing clean, affordable energy for the long-term
More about that later but I just wanted to mention this graph from the document projecting the levels fuel poverty:
This is the second most detached from reality projection I have seen from Government (the first obviously being the Aviation White Paper). In the text the Government state:
The Government … aims to end fuel poverty in vulnerable households in England and Northern Ireland by 2010. A vulnerable household is deemed to be one containing children or the elderly, or someone who is sick or disabled. The overall aim is to ensure, as far as reasonably practicable, that, by 2018, no household in the UK should live in fuel poverty.
How pray tell are they expecting the numbers affected by fuel poverty to fall when the current trend is clearly a rapid rise, when gas prices are rocketing (just today we learn of a further 14.7% increase in gas prices from EDF, owners of London Energy, Seeboard and SWEB), when electricity prices are also rising, when council tax is rising and the energy future out to 2018 is extremely uncertain due to North Sea oil/gas depletion, nuclear decommissioning and coal decommissioning.
My biggest criticism (and doesn’t just apply to this graph but almost all graphs which show historical reality and future projection) is that the present, this year, is described as an inflection point. The trends are presented as changing right now.
I see no evidence to suggest that the there is anything special about 2006 with respect to fuel poverty; I expect the levels of fuel poverty to increase. The Government expect the trend to change yet don’t justify this extraordinary claim.
This post was written by Chris Vernon
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Economy, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 17th, 2006 at 12:06 am
Sadly I don’t have the time to read said report but I would love to know what ‘long-term’ future means exactly. Our beloved rulers are having problems securing the coming energy gap right now. I wish we could gather them all in a locked room, show them Bartlett’s ‘exponential function’ lecture, and ask them to respond precisely to its content. There is almost no responsible political leadership in the UK. To read some of the stuff coming out of DEFRA one has to agree with Private Eye: the Department for the Elimination of Farming and Rural Affairs.
By the way Chris, I very much enjoy your posts at POD…you’re keeping them honest…
February 17th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Yesterday the energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, interviewed on Radio 4 made the comment that he wouldn’t say that gas prices wouldn’t come down over the next few years. I think, though it’s hard to be sure, that he was implying we are indeed near an inflexion point. Crazy.