A critical analysis of the new politics of fuel poverty in England

By L. Middlemiss. 2017

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A household is fuel poor when it is unable to afford the level of energy services required to allow its members to live a decent life. From 2010 to 2015, the UK government transformed the politics of fuel poverty, with a new definition (‘Low income, high costs’ or LIHC), indicators and targets. Using a subjectivity framework to analyse the government documentation around LIHC, I find that: a distinction between poverty and fuel poverty is reinforced by the new politics, resulting in energy efficiency measures being prioritised as the appropriate solution. The austerity maxim of ‘helping those most in need’ is threaded through this new politics, belying an acceptance that not all fuel poverty can be alleviated. Further, LIHC underplays the role of changing energy costs, which now have no impact on the headline indicator. I argue that this new politics is symbolic, and unlikely to have positive impacts for most fuel poor households.

Subfields: Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f41c4581925e624caec1d7a1977b893e5867f833

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Citations in the corpus

Spatializing energy justice (2017, background): “For example, in the UK – where fuel poverty has been recognized for several years – a number of definitions, strategies and alleviation policies have been implemented at both the national and local level (Middlemiss, 2016; Moore, 2012).”
Energy poverty indicators: A critical review of methods (2017, background): “LIHC thus renders prices ‘and indeed the energy market more generally, unproblematic’.(49) In doing so, it reduces the fuel poverty problem to a technical issue of energy efficiency to be addressed primarily through capital investment, leaving unquestioned the institutional arrangements under which ”
‘Getting the measure of fuel poverty’: The geography of fuel poverty indicators in England (2017, unknown): “Middlemiss [18] identifies that the LIHC indicator prioritises energy efficiency as a solution to fuel povertydistracting from other drivers, such as the wider failure of the energy market to provide an affordable, and appropriate energy supply to homes.”
Advancing an energy justice perspective of fuel poverty: Household vulnerability and domestic retrofit policy in the United Kingdom (2017, background): “Early critiques suggest that many vulnerable households will be marginalised by this change and that it effectively sanctions the existence of relative fuel poverty as inevitable in socio-economically unequal societies [112,113,63,18,31].”
Energy poverty and social relations: A capabilities approach (2019, background): “In energy poverty policy, it is common to turn to such a deficit-based account, highlighting older people, people with disabilities and small children as ‘vulnerable’, for instance [34].”