‘Getting the measure of fuel poverty’: The geography of fuel poverty indicators in England

By Caitlin Robinson, Stefan Bouzarovski, Sarah Lindley. 2017

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Recognition of the negative impacts of fuel poverty, a lack of sufficient energy services in the home, has generated considerable interest in how the phenomenon can best be measured. Subsequently, the most well-known indicators deployed in policy-making, the established 10% indicator and the recent Low Income High Cost (LIHC) indicator, have generated considerable discussion and critique. One facet of the debate that remains unexplored is the effect of a change in indicator upon the spatial distribution of fuel poverty. Using spatial analyses we interrogate sub-regional estimates of the two indicators in England, where the LIHC indicator was first conceived. Three principle findings are discussed, enhancing understanding of the geographic features of fuel poverty as understood by each indicator. Firstly, the reduction in fuel poor households has disproportionately affected areas with lower housing costs. Secondly, there is a higher prevalence of fuel poverty in urban areas. Finally, the condition is more spatially heterogeneous with fewer ‘hot-spots’ and ‘cold-spots’. As a result, each indicator captures different notions of what it means to be fuel poor, representing particular vulnerabilities, losses of wellbeing and injustices. This has implications for the targeting of limited alleviation resources and for alternative national contexts where the LIHC indicator might be deployed.

Subfields: Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c62f75b0aed890dca0d515401fb45a1b1ddfd69d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Pollution

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Energy poverty vulnerability index: A multidimensional tool to identify hotspots for local action (2019, unknown): “Hills, 2012; E-Control, 2013; ONPE, 2014), geography (e.g. Anusi and Owoyele, 2016; Robinson et al., 2018), and engineering perspectives (e.”
Temporality, vulnerability, and energy justice in household low carbon innovations (2019, background): “be broader than much of the previous work that has only explored distributional justice and will build on recent work that engages with broader understandings of what drives inequalities and injustices for energy consumers (e.g. Simcock and Mullen, 2016; Gillard et al., 2017; Robinson et al., 2018).”
Objective vs. subjective fuel poverty and self-assessed health (2020, background): “The role of geographic setting in fuel poverty has recently gained relevance (Fahmy et al., 2011; Robinson et al., 2018; Besagni and Borgarello, 2019; Gouveia et al., 2019; Horta et al., 2019; Mashhoodi et al., 2019; Recalde et al., 2019; Sánchez-Guevara et al., 2019).”