Today is the first of a number of seminars being held as part of this year’s National Energy Action Conference. The conference is an annual event led by one of the UK’s biggest fuel poverty charities to raise awareness of the key issues, share best practice and help inform and influence change to eradicate fuel poverty.
It’s an important event and one that SSE has participated in every year. This year’s conference, entitled Turning the Tide: A Sea Change in Action on Fuel Poverty, could make an even bigger impact as it could influence DECC’s new Fuel Poverty Strategy which is currently out for consultation and will be finalised later this year.
At SSE, we take our responsibilities to our most vulnerable customers seriously and are dedicated to doing all we can to protect their well being. Over the past three years, we’ve helped more than 1 million of our customers through the Warm Home Discount and installed over 1.2 million energy efficiency measures through the CERT scheme and its successor, the Energy Company Obligation (ECO).
The above schemes have helped some of our most vulnerable customers and those who are at high risk of fuel poverty. However, SSE, National Energy Action, and many other organisations know more must be done to address fuel poverty in Britain today.
One of the many questions we’ll be asking as part of this year’s NEA conference is something we have been vocal about for some time - whether social and environmental policies (including energy efficiency schemes) are best funded through energy bills.
Currently, the costs for these schemes are spread across all energy bill payers, irrespective or their ability to pay. Of course we strongly support the aims of these schemes - improving the UK housing stock is a crucial part of the fight against fuel poverty – but we also support finding more progressive and fairer ways to fund them.
For example, collecting these costs through general taxation would not only be fairer for the fuel poor, reducing the requirement for them to pay for the very schemes designed to help them, but also keep bills lower for everyone.
At SSE, we’re committed to change that works in the best interests of our customers and we’ve demonstrated this most recently with the introduction of the industry’s longest ever unconditional household energy price freeze. But we won’t stop there.
At this year’s National Energy Action conference, we look forward to being part of the debate and discussion, which we hope will result in a positive sea change to tackle the challenge of fuel poverty effectively.
Will Morris will be speaking at this year’s National Energy Action Conference, Scarborough on 16th September.
You can find our more about the National Energy Action conference by visiting: http://www.nea.org.uk/