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Fuel poverty; exacerbated health conditions and the merry-go-round of hospital admissions and discharge are simply a way of life for so many of our clients. With often no end in sight to rising fuel bills and energy debt, it can be hard to find many positives when you’re living in a cold and damp home.
But thanks to our Home Energy Extra / DAWS programme funded by Cadent Foundation – we’re making genuine progress to support people who are enduring the twin traumas of fuel poverty and poor health.
Based in Birmingham – where fuel poverty rates are well above the national average at nearly 20%, we’re focused on improving living conditions and reducing hospital admissions, as well as helping to prevent bed-blocking by assisting earlier discharges.
In just over a year we’ve engaged with over 600 people, providing energy and benefits advice, and visited more than 370 households to assess how people are living and the real issues that they face on a day-to-day basis. Thanks to Cadent Foundation, we can fund our four Complex Caseworkers to undertake this work and two benefits advisors to support the programme.
It won't be any surprise to find that in these areas suffering high levels of deprivation everyone is experiencing challenges due to the cost-of-living crisis. For many it is becoming a cost of survival.
The twin shock of living in older and poorly maintained properties, combined with rising energy prices, gives the people we see the belief that they genuinely can't afford to keep themselves warm.
In the properties themselves this causes inevitable issues with damp and mould. Insufficient heat and ventilation, crowded living spaces and a lack of building maintenance create the perfect conditions.
One of our recent programme beneficiaries provides an extreme example of this. Living in an end-terraced property in the Lozells area of Birmingham, Laura is a 40-year-old single-mother to a neurodiverse child, who has asthma and special educational needs.
Laura lives with chronic asthma, so it doesn’t help that her social housing property is extremely damp, so much so she can’t safely store items in her kitchen cupboards as mould would appear in the food. Rooms smell and look damp whilst the issue has caused electrical faults preventing use of her air fryer and kettle. An undiagnosed fault with the building's cladding is causing water to settle in the basement which requires an electric pump to drain it. Naturally, this adds to her fuel bills.
Awaab's Law has helped us to effectively challenge social landlords and Birmingham City Council has introduced a useful portal and protocols to address issues, but it is evident from the work we do that the problems are quite overwhelming and any improvements for residents will face a significant backlog.
In this, as in many similar instances, our caseworkers advocate on behalf of householders and use their knowledge and experience to achieve better, quicker outcomes than individuals were able to do on their own. In this particular case, though the damp is not resolved, it has been escalated within the housing association responsible for the property. Additionally our benefits experts were able to secure disability benefits for her, with a backdated payment of £7,000.
Thanks to the resources provided by the Cadent Foundation, we have taken on nearly 400 benefits advice cases, so far producing gains to individuals of £928,000. Combined with energy advice and practical measures of over £150,000 we feel that we are having a positive impact on people's lives if only scratching the surface of the problem.
The foresight of the Foundation to work alongside Cadent’s existing VCMA funding for Birmingham Community Healthcare Charity and provide complex casework support in these communities has been warmly welcomed by organisations and individuals alike. It has been a rewarding experience for all involved, and one we look forward to extending through 2028, learning from the experience to improve health and wellbeing outcomes and lessen the burden on health services.
Read more about how the Cadent Foundation is working with Act on Energy by visiting our website.
