Despite it being ages before you’ll ever need to switch on your central heating, its worrying to find that many people are going to struggle to keep their gas and electricity on this year. Some 4 million people are finding that rising costs of energy from high oil prices and expensive green measures has put them into ‘fuel poverty’, a situation where one tenth or more of income goes on gas and electricity bills - a huge increase from 1.2 million in 2004, reports Times Online.

Even more worrying is that close to 50% of these households are pensioners. Rising unemployment and the current unhealthy state of the UK economy has meant that more and more people are falling into this category.

A damning report from the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group (FPAG) has condemned the lack of response from the Government to try and tackle this issue. The FPAG want a number of radical measures to be taken in order to stay on track to achieve the (now unlikely) target to eradicate all fuel poverty by 2016.

One measure has been to introduce a separate rate for those vulnerable households to ensure they get the cheapest deal and to fatten the budget of Warm Front, which delivers energy efficient measures to people’s homes.

The target for eradication is looking counter-productive to the Government’s carbon budget, which will pass the costs of green initiatives such as building wind farms straight onto the consumers; the FPAG predicts that this could put another 1.7 million households into fuel poverty by 2022. The investment in new power stations that has been announced recently will probably also make its way to consumer bills.

The energy minister David Kidney has acknowledged that the rising costs and transition to a low-carbon energy supply has ‘reversed the downward trend on the number of households in fuel poverty’, but highlights that the Government has spent more than £20 billion since 2000 on policies and programmes to help tackle fuel poverty. He states that the Government will be continuing to ease the burden on low income households and provide the support required to be able to heat and power their homes at an affordable cost.

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