Last week was a change in routine for us as we left our fieldwork and teaching duties aside to bring research evidence on fuel poverty to the Houses of Parliament. We were attending Parliament as part of Parliamentary Evidence Week, a yearly event run by Sense About Science that brings together policy-makers and evidence-makers – MPs, members of the House of Lords, and academics – to discuss how and what evidence is used in policies for critical social and economic issues.
This was our first real outing as the Fuel Poverty Evidence project. This project aims to bring academic research evidence into policy-making: born of our conviction that a lot of UK evidence in this field is underused. This week was an exciting opportunity to bring our passion for fuel poverty, and the people affected by it, to politicians in a position to shape policy or to hold it to account. Given the current costs of energy, and in the face of the coming winter, our evidence has a hugely important role to play in helping politicians.
We spent all day on Wednesday in personal meetings with 10 politicians plus other key researchers and journalists. Our conversations were wide ranging – from the climate crisis, constituency casework on fuel poverty, and the recent tragic and shameful death of a toddler due to exposure to mould. We talked about the urgent need for solutions on this front, including:
- Developing a trustworthy national energy advice programme to help prevent people being exposed to unhelpful, commercially-driven advice (for instance, advice that suggests you buy products that heat your body, rather than your home). Whilst advice alone cannot solve fuel poverty, it can bring important relief to people who are suffering if properly delivered and focused.
- A much more ambitious government-funded energy efficiency programme to start as soon as possible to begin to alleviate cost pressures and bring multiple benefits to public health and decarbonisation goals.
- Further energy bill support for people with additional energy needs – such as disabled people, older people and the very young – who are among the most vulnerable to fuel poverty. In this regard, we also highlighted problems with recent government reforms that mean people claiming Disability Living Allowance are no longer eligible to receive support through the Warm Home Discount programme, leaving them more vulnerable to rising energy costs.
- Reforming domestic energy tariffs to ensure that some of those most vulnerable to energy poverty are not typically paying disproportionately expensive amounts for the energy they use (as was the case even before the current price crisis). The options of a social tariff and “Universal Basic Energy” were discussed as possible solutions in this regard.
In addition to these constructive and critical discussions, we also learnt a lot from this Evidence Week experience on how to approach and engage with policy-makers. In the preceding weeks we were strategic about contacting politicians, looking for those with an interest in energy, climate change, poverty, and housing. We found that a great way to find engaged politicians is through the All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG). APPGs bring together politicians from across all parties to hold the government to account on specific issues. The APPG on Fuel Poverty and Energy Efficiency and the APPG on Energy Costs were obvious targets, and those with interests in housing and planning, climate change, older people, and health.
The next step in our learning is how to get traction with policy makers who are not already engaged in the fuel poverty debate. Our Evidence Week may have been even more fruitful if we had been able to engage with more MPs from the current government and from a wider geographical spread.
Overall, the experience was a huge learning curve for us. We leave it feeling more confident about how to approach and interact with MPs about our research and evidence, and are heartened by the level of interest by some in the political community for using research evidence to inform solutions to the current fuel poverty emergency. We are still available for new discussions, plus we will be following up with the MPs we spoke to in the coming week, providing further key evidence and building upon these fledgling relationships.
The latest briefing from the Fuel Poverty Evidence team can be found here.