Half UK households face fuel poverty

[Faciadipasta]

Article on the BBC website today. Surely the government can't let this happen? Its an absolute disaster. Both for individual people and also for the wider economy. We'd be facing another depression, surely? If people can't afford to heat and eat they're hardly likely to be spending on anything else. I don't know how we're all going to get through this. Actually feeling scared.

The government will change the definition/ threshold for fuel poverty, and poverty in general soon, then there won't be as many people in poverty...problem solved, right?!

I strongly doubt this. 1) The source is EDF so hardly objective. 2) they conveniently didn’t define fuel poverty in the article. They are just trying to lobby the government for extra support for their business.

At this point I have given up stressing about the reports of the cap could be £6k plus by next year. It might as well keep going up now and get to £12k or why not £20k - the crazier the price the better - at least then it will be obvious to everyone that it needs sorting. It’s moving from my god that’s expensive to a impossible amount for just about everyone.

Wonder how much profit EDF made last year?

They made a loss of £1728m according to their financial statements which are easily available on their website.

Fuel poverty used to mean if you spent more than 10% of your income on fuel. They changed the definition a few years ago I think. But I think if it was the old 10% then most of us are in fuel poverty. When our fix ends in January we will be well over the old fuel poverty definition as we will be paying about 450 a month.

The government don't give a shit about us though. So nothing will change.

the french are mostly nuclear and nationalised so all ok..edf customers in france get capped and cheap electric...current and ex employees pay pennies for their electric also.....uk customers with them subsidise them...!!..all our govts have ignored any crisis for years and all of them...all parties just hope for a warm winter....tories have no plans at all and the opposition has no plans either....germany burning coal again whilst telling the hungarians and polish not to....all a mess.....no idea what the solution is...

They already have, they exclude those houses with energy ratings c and above from the figures.

Fortunately the fuel poverty charities seem to be sticking to the 10% of income definition and the media seems to be following suit.

What's worse than that, op. Is the number of homes which will fine themselves in extreme fuel poverty. I was too lazy to read your link so not sure if it covers it but it is huge and really speaks to the severity of the situation.

Well, this is a very simplistic view of the French energy landscapes which ignore the fact EDF is suing the government for forcing them to sell at such low prices and that the nuclear facilities are aged and in need of urgent costly repairs.

EDF owned by the French Government, made a loss of something like 150 million last year. Is this article because they want the British Government to pay their customer's bills?

It's defined as more than 10pc of income on fuel. Obviously the impact depends on overall income and other expenses. So it may not be as informative a piece of information as all that.