Will you be cutting back on your heating this year?
With energy prices having rocketed twice over the course of this year, it seems that an increasing number of us will have to cut back on our energy usage in order to cope with rising bills. Many elderly people will be doing just that, and recent surveys have revealed that millions of elderly people will be heating up just one room in their homes or even staying in bed in order to try and keep warm over the winter months. For many the colder months are set to be miserable ones.
One recent survey was carried out amongst over twelve hundred elderly consumers, and around one quarter of these said that they would end up having to stay in bed to keep warm this winter because of the high cost of energy usage. It is also thought that around four and a half million elderly people will have to heat up just one room in their home over the winter period so that their energy bills are not too high, and many are angry at the government for not doing more to help people in this situation.
One elderly housing association resident who was polled as part of the survey said: “The association is going to put in a new central heating system for me and that should hopefully keep the costs down a bit more, but for now I plan to stay in my bed under the covers if it gets too bad. You feel the cold a lot more when you get older and sometimes it gets to the point where you think ‘I’ll either eat or I’ll heat’.”
The problem has stemmed from the fact that whilst crude oil prices have plummeted over the past few months, falling to around half the level that they were in the summer, energy firms are still claiming that wholesale prices are high, and have therefore not reduced energy usage costs after two increases over the course of this year. It is thought that the average household bill has gone up by over £1300 after rises in gas and electricity usage, and even though some energy firms have said that prices could decrease soon many are already suffering a cold winter as the dark, cold nights set in.
An official from Help the Aged said that the government needs to do more to help more vulnerable groups such as the elderly to warm their homes this winter, adding: “Every single day the situation gets worse. The government measures do not match the scale of the problem. It’s about examining, as a whole, energy efficiency, the money people actually have and the cost of fuel.
Tags: Household, money, heating costs, order, whilst, christmasHowever, an official from the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We’ve increased funding to our Warm Front scheme to around £800m, and through it have provided heating and insulation improvements to 1.7 million homes, saving about £300 per household each year.”
