Conversation Upgrade #4 - UK Fuel Poverty

I read another news article about the recent increase in cost of fuel heating oil in the UK... which yet again doesn't engage with, or surface the most important facts and figures.

It's more non-news, non-sense-making. This time about the government announcing a "£53m support package". There's so many problems with the article itself, but again I want to be clear: I don't think we can expect one human, even with a team, to get all of this even moderately right. We need to do it collectively.

It's hard work writing these articles, and interviewing people to get their human lived experiences is crucial. But the underlying facts and figures and calculations are just as important too because they allow us to see more clearly what paths are open to our nation and which ones are just wishful thinking.

It's hard producing a policy that's going to be effective... Is it though?

One assumes so but it's not stated, why not?

The only significant lever that I know which can be used is to release emergency stockpiles of oil.¹ Of course this raises questions such as how much to release, how much do we have and how much effect will this have?

Yet under the article's section "What is being done" it claims:

There are emergency stockpiles of oil ... which could be released.

But these are being released - "Countries agree to record release of emergency oil reserves".

So even this basic and important fact is wrong. And there's no easy way to help correct it.

Credit for including the following, but frustrating there's no follow up.

It's like someone's never finished their sentence which started "And the most interesting thing is ..."

Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho said that while the support was welcome, "the government must go further".

Go further where, do what? Please elaborate.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey called for VAT on heating oil to be suspended and a price cap implemented. Households using heating oil "deserve the same kinds of protections as those on the grid", he added.

What effect would that have? Why have we not done it already? Would this be temporary or long term? If long term how does this fit with your ideals to do xyz policy.

Is this all just noise? Is it just more hot air?

The First Minister of Northern Ireland, Michelle O'Neill, described the £17m pledge as a "slap in the face".

The Sinn Féin vice-president said the funding "doesn't touch the surface of what is required" for those affected.

How much would be enough? And from the linked to article

funding that the UK government had made available to the Executive was "extremely disappointing" and "significantly below par".

I assume that's just more rhetoric rather than comparing the funding to what was done before? You can only be above or below par if you have a par to compare to. So what is the par here? What would be a good amount of funding?

But big props for doing some basic maths!

O'Dowd explained that with half a million homes in NI relying on oil fired central heating the funding works out at around £35 per household.

You don't often see that, and the value's correct, you often don't see that either! Proposed funding per home for Northern Ireland heating fuel, 2026: 32 £ per home.

If you'd not noticed, I think this article is frustrating and mostly pointless.

Reading the comments doesn't make it any better. People are clutching at little fragments of wisdom: it's the oil companies, we need to drill more, drill less, subsidise, regulate, wear jumpers, cold acclimatise. Everyone's got a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. We need to weave all of these together into a complete picture.

The article reports:

Simon Francis, co-ordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said it wanted to see details of how the support would work and who would qualify. [...] talk of stronger regulation [...] sounded more like a signal of intent than a concrete plan".

Exactly.

Where's the plan? Who will qualify for funding?

There is no plan at the moment. And this is confusing because for someone with the data already at hand they probably should already have a plan ready to go? And if not then perhaps it would take a day to get a basic plan together and then a week or two asking experts and general public to review and improve it.

Why don't we do this? This seems trivial. What am I missing?

Any plan is not going to please everyone, nor even be a good plan that survives contact with reality but it's better to have a plan and iterate quickly than just waste time talking whilst we're collectively stumbling about confused. And for some people that confusion brings fear and that in itself is needless suffering. Let alone being in a cold home.

We have a definition from the ONS, why not link to it?

ONS have data on this and provide a "Download this chart as CSV" option. But when they say "Annual Fuel Poverty Statistics (Annex D) from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero" it would have been helpful if they had linked to that data source.

When I search for that myself I can find multiple pages for fuel poverty by year, but finding the data I need would require me to go through each (large) spreadsheet and manually extract the values from them.

I did some more digging. I just wanted figures for fuel poverty. Specifically older ones from 2014 and earlier. Instead I got https://datacatalogue.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datasets/dataset/cd34d9a5-4369-c560-8d38-5cb0cbffffc6 but it lacks the context for me to make sense of which number is important, and I am now not even sure if it is publicly available despite the previous page suggesting it was.

We've got the same graph as on ONS but hopefully it's easier to find as its not buried half way down a page of 8000 words. Nor is it swamped with hundreds of other useful variables but less useful if all you want is this, FYI definition of LILEE is here:

As someone who's elderly relative is currently sitting in a cold house from lack of heating oil I'm abundantly aware of how dangerous and even just uncomfortable it is.

But if you look at this graph it's clear we've been here before. I'm old enough to remember 2022... when the nation was plunged into another instance of fuel poverty driven by war... but what did we do to solve it then? Are we doing the same thing now? If not, why not?

Graphs like these can bring context. Yes it took me a couple of hours making various edits to the supporting CSV parsing functions and adding python scripts² to munge the data but this is now a resource that anyone can use.

I don't think people realise how disconnected we and our public discourse are from reality and the quite simple data and facts that underlay our collective flourishing or lack of it.

We've just got used to not knowing what's going on, drifting about in hot air, or giving up in apathetic confusion.

It's hard to think about how we think. And we're not understanding where our flourishing actually comes from and then prioritising funding and improving that.⁴

In some regards I think we're so close to being able to have 10x news articles, and from those 10x conversations and 10x democratic leadership. We're smart but I think we're just not able to see and imagine how much better our conversations could be.

After speaking about this with others the conversation progressed further...