I cry every day.. I’ve never seen things this bad
Plumber James helps Britain’s most vulnerable
James Anderson is a tough, old-fashioned kind of man. But he cries every day when he sees people driven to suicide and despair by the cost of living crisis.
He is the founder of the Disabled and Elderly Heating Emergency Repairs, a charity that helps people keep their heating running.
Now, in the face of soaring fuel and food costs, they do much more: filling empty fridges and cupboards, paying bills, bailiffs and even buying nappies for those who just can’t afford it.
James and his team are at the sharp end of this crisis – and they say it’s only getting worse.
“I cry every day,” he says, “I’ve never seen things this bad. One old lady needed a new boiler, we were trying to get one for her. There was a dish of what I thought were sweets on the table. When I looked closely they were tablets. She told me she’d been going to take them all, said she couldn’t take anymore and wanted to disappear.
“I arrived at another house to find an 84-year-old lady with a noose around her neck. You think, ‘this can’t be happening’ but it is.
“I just went to see a family – the mum rang crying her eyes out because she couldn’t feed her kids, literally.
“This is affecting everyone. But if you’re in poverty we’ll help you.”
Fighting tears, he adds: “No one from the Government or any public body are coming to help. These people get elected promising to do this and that for their communities and they don’t care. The Government has seen this coming for the last two or three years and done nothing. “People will be dying this winter.” As James, 54, explains, things have been getting steadily worse since he set up the charity in 2017.
He was moved to act after meeting an elderly man who was scammed by an unscrupulous plumbing firm – and to do something good in memory of his baby son, William.
William was born with a back-tofront heart and had surgery in 2013. He and wife, Barbara, 47, had to turn off his life support at 16 weeks.
Helping others became a way for James to channel his grief and honour William. “In 2017 I went to see a gentleman who was disabled and bed-bound,” he explains. “He’d had a firm round and they’d tried to scam him for £5,500. I thought about William. The day he died I made a promise to him that
I would be the man he would have grown up to be, that I’d make him proud.
“I got the firm to come back and make good what they’d done – I made sure he got a new boiler for free – but I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about all the other people in his position.
“Heating is such an important part of feeling safe and warm but when it goes wrong people just don’t have the funds to put it right. They’re vulnerable to being exploited. A UN report said 17,000 people in the UK had died because of the cold. Our Government didn’t even acknowledge that. I thought, ‘if the Government won’t do anything, I will’.”
In 2017 he set up a Community Interest Company, offering free help for people who needed it. Since then James, who won a Pride of Manchester Award last month, has provided £1.2million of support to people in his hometown Burnley, Lancs, and the wider UK.
He puts profits from his own heating firm into the charity, topped up by fundraising and a community shop.
The day my son William died I promised I’d make him proud JAMES ANDERSON BELOW, WITH BARBARA
"If someone pays £2,000 for a boiler, we can put £700 of that back,” he says. Among those helped by James was single mum Katie from Burnley, who lives with her two children in rented accommodation. Her friend called the charity as they were worried her boiler wasn’t working.
As well as her heating, the charity also sorted out her broken front door, ordered her carpets and filled her empty cupboards with £300 of food. James has seen things getting even tougher of late. “What does it do to a kid when they see their mum not able to feed them?” he says. “It’s very scary. “The Government needs to underand what’s happening, what’s needed, how people are living.”
Our leaders need to understand how people are living.. it’s scary
JAMES ON STRUGGLE FACED BY MANY BRITS