HOW NEW SENSOR TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP ADDRESS BRITAIN’S FUEL POVERTY CRISIS

To combat fuel poverty we need to bring forward data-led solutions

This month many families up and down the country will look at their revised energy bill and wonder exactly how they are going to be able to meet the rising costs of staying warm.

However, the brutal truth is that some of these people will not manage to stay warm. Some of them will fall ill. Some of them will even die. This is simply because they cannot afford to put the heating on.

“Even before recent price hikes, fuel poverty was responsible for over 10,000 excess winter deaths each year in the UK,” Chris Jones from leading home safety company Aico tells The House. “With spiralling costs of energy, food and fuel, we are likely to see even more households struggling to afford to heat their homes.”

Fuel poverty might be a growing problem but it is certainly not a new one. It is a long standing challenge for the UK, particularly for those on low incomes, or who live in poorly insulated or off-grid homes. The latest government figures show that a staggering three million households live in fuel poverty in England alone. That was before recent increases in the price of energy.

Jones believes that the scale of the challenge created by the cost of living crisis means that we now need to be developing different

approaches that can help Britain stay warm. “As a nation we need to find new ways to help those who are suffering from fuel poverty,” he explains. “Modern sensor technology is now opening up new routes for landlords to identify those who are in fuel poverty and then to target support more effectively.”

One example of this technology is Aico’s new Home LINK environmental sensor. These state-ofthe-art sensors capture not just the temperature of a home, but also assess indoor air quality, triggering alerts for landlords which allow them to intervene if a household is identified as being in fuel poverty.

Wera Hobhouse, Lib Dem MP for Bath believes that such approaches are urgently needed as households struggle to meet rising costs. “The cost of living crisis will plunge many more people into fuel poverty,” she tells The House. “Innovative data-led approaches to tackle fuel poverty are needed to help those who desperately need it.”

Fuel poverty is often a hidden problem. This means that identifying households in need of support can be the first critical step in addressing the issue. Modern sensor technology provides a much more efficient and effective way of doing this than traditional stock condition surveys or tenant outreach programmes.