Flint’s challenging first year chairing fuel poverty committee

When Caroline Flint was unveiled just over a year ago as the surprise new chair of the government’s Committee on Fuel Poverty (CfP), the invasion of Ukraine was still germinating in Vladimir Putin’s mind.

Within a month of the former Labour minister’s appointment to become only the second head of the fuel poverty watchdog, the energy world had been upended as Europe’s main supplier of gas transformed into the major threat to peace and security across the continent.

Fuel poverty was already rising up the agenda on the back of the post-pandemic spike in gas prices.

However concerns about energy costs have rocketed during Flint’s first year as chair, resulting in a series of government interventions that have so far cost the public purse tens of billions of pounds.

And she has heard some grim stories since taking the helm of the CfP, which was set up under the coalition government to monitor progress on tackling the scourge of fuel poverty.

They include people only heating a single room, cooking in one pot and not even eating hot food because they are afraid of turning on the microwave or a cooker.

Flint says: “People having to cut back in a way that you just wouldn’t imagine

“People have literally tried everything they can to reduce their energy.

“Even then with some of those people, despite everything they are doing, the unit cost of energy is still so high it is just not making a dent.”

The committee’s annual fuel poverty statistical update, which was published last week, puts some hard figures on these tales of human woe.

The grim but sadly unsurprising headline reading was that the CfP believes this year will see the first rise in the fuel poverty rate during the 13 years since the body has been established.

The proportion of fuel poor households in England is predicted to increase from 13.4% to 14.4% this year.

Perhaps most shocking though is the increase in the projected average fuel poverty gap for England, which measures the reduction in fuel costs that households would need in order not to be fuel poor.

This figure is projected to be £443 per annum this year, which is 31% higher than the projection of £338 for 2022 and 73% higher than 2021’s actual out-turn figure of £254.

Despite acknowledging what she describes as the “incredible amount of money” that the government has put into subsidising energy bills over the last year, Flint says: “That just gives you a really stark idea about where people’s incomes are in relation to tackling this problem.

“We found too that for some people, it just seems an impossible task to bridge that gap.”

Relief is on the way with bills widely expected to fall this year to around £2,000 per annum.

However this is the kind of figure, which was already creating sleepless nights for those in fuel poverty pre-Ukraine invasion.

Even before the post-pandemic surge in energy prices, people in fuel poor households were already struggling to make ends meet. Flint adds: “We should recognise the support that’s been made available but many people were still finding it really difficult paying for their fuel bills and keeping warm before we had this surge in prices.”

Flint, who is Zooming in from south Yorkshire where she was an MP until losing her Don Valley constituency at the last general election, is clearly glad that the government appears set to keep the level of the Energy Price Guarantee at £2,500 rather than increasing it to £3,000 as proposed at in the Treasury’s autumn statement.

However keeping the EPG at £2,500 won’t be sufficient for those on very low incomes as other help including the £67 per month Energy Bills Support Scheme comes to an end. Flint says: “There is still an additional discussion to be had about other support, even if it (the EPG) stays at £2,500, given some of the other support mechanisms that have been put in place to help people or coming to an end.

“The £2500 price guarantee is still too high. Even though it helped a lot of people, it still wasn’t on its own enough to protect those in fuel poverty.

“We’re now heading into spring but people are still feeling shock waves from how much it’s cost in the last year and that’s likely to go on for some time.”

The 62-year old’s committee will be conducting its own research over the coming months into the lessons learnt from the last year’s intervention in terms of improving the delivery of fuel poverty schemes and support.

This includes using the CfP’s small research budget to commission work from consultancy London Economics examining the impact of the support provided during the past winter.

A clear lesson already for Flint is that the concentrated nature of the fuel poverty gap, as uncovered by the CfP, underlines the case for a social tariff for low-income households when the EPG runs out in April next year.

The CfP has yet to come to a view on how any social tariff should be structured but she is interested in a recent proposal by the Resolution Foundation thinktank that it could be fixed at two thirds of whatever the headline rate.

While understanding the decision to provide blanket sums of money for every household due to the wider affordability challenges that the crisis sparked, Flint says the CfP has been very clear that additional support should be targeted at those who most need it.

One of the big hurdles though in terms of targeting, which has bedevilled initiatives like the ECO (Energy Companies Obligation), has been how data matching can be used to ensure that low income working households get help, like those on benefits who are often easier to identify.

There are good reasons why departments may be reluctant to share data, the former shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change acknowledges.

“Clearly, there are issues around protecting people’s data. If you share data about someone’s status in terms of benefits, not everyone’s going to necessarily be happy with that,” Flint adds.

But these concerns mean there should be a big focus on working out how matching can be achieved in a way that doesn’t undermine individuals’ rights to personal data, she says: “We have to find a way to deal with this because we are literally shooting ourselves in the foot if we’re not able to.”

This is the kind of blunt speech that helped Flint to develop a reputation as a staunch critic of suppliers, when serving in Ed Miliband’s shadow Cabinet and later helping to lead the cross-party campaign for an energy price cap.

She is therefore unsurprisingly unimpressed by The Times recent investigation into forced installation of pre-payment meters by Centrica, noting that it has “exposed that some of the suppliers are not in control of what’s happening in terms of the due diligence process and the contractors that they’re using”.

However the “buck stops” with the energy companies, which should be looking at the quality of their engagement with customers, Flint says: “How we heat our homes and keep our lights on are vital to life necessities.

“That does entitle the government to expect a higher order of engagement and delivery of those services. That’s understood by most of the people working in the sector: the question for them is how well they’re doing that.”

The recent Whitehall shake-up, which has essentially recreated the department Flint used to shadow with a focus on energy security and net zero “makes sense” but is not sufficient.

There has to be joined up thinking across government on these issues as well when it comes to fuel poverty,” she says, noting that other departments will still have a key role to play, including health and work and pensions.

One area where she particularly highlights the need for this kind of cross-departmental work is addressing the energy efficiency of private rented sector housing.

The widely reported difficulties getting customers on pre-payment meters to redeem discount vouchers has lessons for helping poorer households install energy efficiency upgrades, Flint says: “The further we go into this area, we’re going to come across the harder to reach communities and that might require a different way of looking at this.”

And while rising fuel bills have swallowed up any cash benefits resulting from improvements in households’ energy efficiency this year, it is important not to lose sight of the latter.

The number of people on low incomes still living in homes that are rated below EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) band D is “concerning”, she says. “For those people living in poorly insulated homes, whatever support we give them we’ don’t want wasted because it’s going out of the fabric of their buildings.

“We have to ramp up energy efficiency programmes for those people.

“It’s very easy for energy efficiency to get lost in some of the discussions and that would be short sighted. To allow that to happen would be a failure.”