David Hilferty on the inevitable winter fuel crisis
“It’s starting to really pick up now.” A colleague from our Extra Help Unit said to me the other day as temperatures start to drop and the nights start to get darker.
The Extra Help Unit is our Glasgow-based team of expert caseworkers who support people in the most vulnerable circumstances with their energy needs.
That means when you’re off supply, they get your heating back on. When the meter runs out, they keep your lights on.
And while it’s never quiet for them, winter inevitably means things get really busy.
That’s the context in which Ofgem recently unveiled its long-awaited plans to write off up to £500 million worth of energy debt across the UK.
Framed as a ‘reform and reset’, for us it fails on both measures.
To reset requires a comprehensive and far-reaching approach. With energy debt at an eye-watering £4.4 billion, the level of relief outlined is but a flicker in the dark.
Moreover, conditions are tight and the timeline is narrow – the write-off is restricted to debt accrued between April 2022 and March 2024.
The average energy debt we see in Scottish CABs is over £2,500 – it didn’t suddenly stop increasing after that period. Because as we have attested so many times in these pages, the energy crisis isn’t over. Nor is the cost of living crisis.
And to truly reform the broken energy market, systemic and wholesale change is required in the shape of action such as a social tariff that makes energy bills affordable in the long-term.
We see first-hand what it means when the energy market fails to function in a way that serves people on low incomes or vulnerable circumstances.
A CAB adviser recently shared the experience of a father who came for help because he had no money to heat his home or buy food. A medical condition meant that he’d had to stop working. In that moment where he needed some support, he had to wait over a month for his first Universal Credit payment – another example of systemic failure. His daughter lives with him at weekends and he fears that he can’t care for her properly without emergency support from a food bank and fuel bank.
Pause on that for a moment. That’s about warmth, light and hot food on the table – the essentials all of us should have. To go without these would prevent a dad spending time with his daughter. That should shame us all. Again, the Ofgem proposal on energy debt will do little to ease situations like this one.
Especially when it won’t even happen that soon. As currently proposed, the relief scheme will take effect from April 2026 at the earliest.
This time last year, I was writing in this column that we can’t go through another winter without a debt write-off scheme and an affordable social tariff. And yet, here we are about to do just that.
For us, that amounts to the toleration of harm.
Government and regulators know what’s coming down the line, and yet again we’re not ready for it.
This is as avoidable as it is inexcusable. It’s long past time for government and regulators to step up.
David Hilferty is director of impact at Citizens Advice Scotland.
This column was first published in the Herald.
