With thousands of older people dying unnecessarily each winter because of cold homes, it’s good that this issue is finally getting some attention. We need a more co-ordinated approach and must resist attempts to scrap or means test Winter Fuel Payments
What a difference a year makes. Political rows about rising fuel prices and fuel poverty, Sir John Major’s attack on the government’s energy policy, and the publication of Public Health England’s annual ‘Cold Weather Plan’, have suddenly pushed excess winter deaths to the top of the news agenda.
Such attention is long overdue. One of the biggest public policy challenges – and national scandals facing society – is the prevalence of preventable excess winter deaths each year, numbering around 24,000 older people.
Year after year, such deaths – and the wider £1.36bn annual cost of cold-related illness to the NHS in England – go completely ignored in the Westminster bubble and among the political commentariat.
A key reason is that excess winter deaths are a multi-layered problem with multiple causes, including human behaviour, poorly insulated homes, rising fuel prices, and the fact that many older people are simply unaware of their own physiological changes as they age, and their increased vulnerability to the cold.
Unfortunately, government policy responses over the years have been as confusing as the problem itself. You can identify major policy programmes to address the effect of cold on households across – count ‘em – four government departments: Work & Pensions, Health, Energy & Climate Change and Communities & Local Government
However, the policies put in place by these departments have been largely uncoordinated, and there has been no overall government strategy to bring down excess winter deaths linking across multiple departments.
In a report entitled ‘Cold Enough’ published earlier this year, the Strategic Society Centre recommended:
• A single national ‘at-risk’ register for the cold, integrating DWP, energy company, GP and local authority data.
• Giving clinical commissioning groups responsibilities for excess winter deaths.
• Enabling CCGs and Health and Wellbeing Boards to refer households for free home insulation under the government’s Energy Company Obligation.
• Making excess winter deaths and cold-related illness a ministerial priority.
But perhaps even before any of this, we need to kick out the ageism and ignorance that continues to see well-paid, working-age, London-based commentators repeatedly taking aim at Winter Fuel Payments.
We know Winter Fuel Payments boost household expenditure on fuel, and represent a highly effective behavioural policy response to a behavioural policy problem: ‘fear of the heating switch’ among older people living on a fixed income, that is exacerbated by round after round of announcements on energy price increases.
Underlying attacks on the Winter Fuel Payment is the lazy – and wrong – assumption that excess winter deaths and cold-related illness among older people are limited to those on low incomes and who receive means-tested benefits. If politicians want to cut the State Pension by £200 per year – fine – but scrapping or means-testing Winter Fuel Payments, as many pundits would like to do, would cost lives and cost the NHS.
As autumn turns to winter, we stand on the brink of another 24,000 older people in 21st century Britain dying because of the cold weather. It is high time this issue got the attention it deserves.
James Lloyd is director of the Strategic Society Centre
