UK Fuel Poverty Monitor 2022-23

National Energy Action (NEA) and Energy Action Scotland (EAS) are the UK’s national charities aiming to end fuel poverty. For two decades, we have published a yearly investigative report on progress to eliminate fuel poverty across the UK and within each of the four UK nations:

This year’s UKFPM is more important than ever. With 6.5 million UK households in fuel poverty this winter, the report highlights the impact the crisis is having on progress towards fuel poverty targets across the four nations. It then highlights what the priorities should be for a reinvigorated approach to abate endemic fuel poverty levels and generate the greatest societal, economic and environmental benefits.

This year’s UKFPM focuses on the fuel poverty strategies that exist across the UK nations, noting the differences in each government’s approach, before considering the actions that are being taken to meet the targets set in the strategies. This includes an analysis of how each separate part of the plan is coming together, and how the current suite of policies operate to meet the different fuel poverty targets. There is also an overview of the benefits case for alleviating fuel poverty through improving energy efficiency across a number of different actors, whether it is fuel poor households themselves, their landlords, the broader economy, or the environment.

To inform our analysis, we issued a Call for Evidence (CfE) to stakeholders across the UK, which received 136 responses. The CfE was circulated across sectors such as energy supply, distribution, and installation; local, regional, and national governments; health and social care; housing; and not-for-profit and charitable organisations. The CfE aimed to explore the views of our stakeholders and members on the fuel poverty strategies: in particular, the policies that they help to put into practice through their delivery work. Put differently, our CfE was an intelligence-gathering exercise on how strategies are working across the UK, and we have channelled the views and experiences of fuel poor households, via the organisations that support them, into this work.

Importantly, we also conducted interviews with fuel poor and vulnerable households to understand more about how the crisis was impacting them, which we have incorporated into this report as case studies. All case studies are anonymised to protect the identity of households. As always, we are enormously grateful to all interviewees and CfE respondents for taking the time to submit their views and experiences to us, and to those respondents who kindly responded to our requests for further evidence and information.

You can download the reports below or view here on Issuu.

Full Report

Executive summary