Government strategy on fuel poverty not fit for purpose, says think tank

The extreme cold of the past few weeks has highlighted the need for urgent Government action, as the additional death toll from this exceptionally cold winter is due to top last year's total of 36,700, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said today.

Despite numerous fuel poverty programmes and hundreds of millions of pounds invested by the Government and by the energy industry, the problem has been increasing over the past five years, it warned.

In a report entitled Fuel Poverty: What Next? the IPPR called on the Government to commission an independent review of its emergency measures to help people cope with peaks of cold weather and its longer-term strategy to address fuel poverty.

"Fuel poverty" is defined as needing to spend more than 10 per cent of your income on keeping warm, and the Government has set itself a target of eradicating the problem by 2016.

The Energy Bill currently going through Parliament will require energy companies to contribute at least 300m a year towards financial support for their poorest customers by 2013-14.