Fuel poverty in Britain has not peaked – and online disinformation is making it worse

It's no April Fool, energy prices are going up today, while the number of people struggling to survive is on the rise.

The price of keeping a home warm will rise once again Pic: The Lead

When public health expert Dr Alexis Paton started investigating the link between fuel poverty and health, she knew she would hear heart-breaking stories of bare-survival on the lowest incomes. What she didn’t expect was to witness living conditions that were positively Victorian.

One elderly woman was reliant on wet wipes to keep herself clean. She had no heating apart from a drafty 200-year-old fireplace in her living room, so she had stopped bathing at home. She was also suffering from repeated UTIs due to being unable to keep herself sufficiently clean.

Fuel poverty affects not only quality of life, but its shape too. Dr Paton’s team found many were forced to confine themselves to a single room, including sleeping hours. Others were living on sandwiches to avoid the cost of energy to cook hot food.

They heard from families trying to raise children in freezing, damp properties, playing games with their kids to see how many layers they could put on in a desperate attempt to stay warm. Often these families had not sought help for fuel poverty due to the perceived shame of their situation; many did not even realise help was available.

The cost of electricity and gas is a major issue for many struggling to heat their homes, and there is little respite as the new energy price cap is confirmed today [1 April]. Yet fuel poverty is a much broader crisis. It’s not only that energy costs so much, but so many people have no access to modern energy systems at all.

The only choice for these families is expensive oil, or solid fuel such as wood. Even those properties that do have mains connections may be in very poor condition, meaning they still cost a huge amount to heat; when they are underheated, they become damp causing health conditions like asthma.

Around 4.4 million properties in Britain are not connected to mains gas, and 16 per cent of these are considered to be in fuel poverty. More than 350,000 properties have no source of heat at all.

Most off grid properties are served by electricity-based heating systems such as storage heaters, but 6 per cent of English homes, mostly older properties, rely on expensive oil heaters, or solid fuels such as coal or wood.

“It’s a chicken and egg situation,” says Dr Paton. “Some people end up in fuel poverty because they’re in poor health and they’re on benefits and so low pay, and unable to heat their homes and make changes to their homes, and that makes them sicker, so it keeps getting worse. And there are some people who are in homes that they are struggling to heat, so that makes them sick and that then makes it harder for them to do everyday tasks and work.”

The government argues that fuel poverty is diminishing, but that’s not what the data tells us. Even before the removal of the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners, the number of people coming forward seeking help for fuel poverty is rising and demand is no longer only from the very poorest.

Marches, a charity working in Derbyshire and the Midlands, provided figures exclusively to The Lead to chart the change in need. In 2002, it provided help and guidance on energy bills to 4,391 clients and offered emergency financial assistance in cash handouts, and other practical support (including providing blankets and low energy lightbulbs), to 5,332 more people. By 2024, the number requiring immediate financial support to pay urgent bills had declined to 3,119 but the number in need of guidance and support to manage their energy costs had risen rapidly to 5,610. By early March 2025, 1,995 people had already been in touch for support.

Support workers say the number of people requiring support does not fluctuate significantly between winter and summer months, either. These are not just people who are struggling to keep warm, but those who are not able to cook hot food or heat water for bathing.

In February, Dr Paton hosted a fuel poverty workshop at Aston University in Birmingham. A host of frontline staff (including GPs, Citizens Advice advisors, and council public health experts) shared the things they had seen through the freezing winter months. These included pensioners living by candlelight to save on electricity bills, and one family cooking on a garden barbeque inside their living room, an extremely dangerous attempt to both provide hot food and warmth to one room.

The saddest finding, however, was that some of these people should not have found it hard to pay moderate household bills on their pension or benefits income – yet they had been terrified into living in a state of fuel poverty by online disinformation. Some were even making their financial situation worse by following incorrect advice spread online, sometimes by bad actors but more commonly by ordinary people sharing rumour and misinformation.

A common phrase heard from clients was that they had seen money saving articles and social media posts that said “it costs more than £5 to boil your kettle”. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not true; boiling water for a single mug of tea or coffee costs less than 2p.

One low-income support worker said they had a client who was spending up to £4 per cup on coffee from cafes because they thought it was cheaper than making a drink at home.

In this low information environment, local charities are working hard in communities right across the country to alleviate fuel poverty at a local level. But with benefit cuts now being ushered in under a new plan for government finances, and the axing of the winter fuel allowance, the situation is only worsening. The price cap is nowhere near enough to tackle the depth of the problem.

We are on the cusp of a warm summer, with temperatures predicted to soar, but it brings no respite. Our housing is unfit, and our poorest communities are struggling to survive on lower than subsistence incomes, and they are making decisions based on bad information too. As fuel poverty continues to grow, the costs to the public purse will soar - in health costs and disability support, in lost hours of work, and in a reduced tax take. This is the cost of living crisis that refuses to go away.

About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing. She has a special interest in inequality, poverty, housing, education and life chances.

Here at The Lead we are keeping a watchful eye on the varied causes of spiralling poverty in this country, from the Chancellor’s brutal cuts to welfare, to the social mobility cold spots deepening economic divides between the countryside and cities, to the unequal burden of council tax that impacts society’s poorest. We need your support to continue this work, so consider taking a paid-for subscription to support our independent journalism about people, policy and place.