Letter

Health warning on housing policy

Health warning on housing policy

Dear healthmatters - Nigel Parkes-Rolfe’s article (Safe as houses?, issue 9) raises important questions about the relationship between ill health and bad housing. One of the most important issues is ‘affordable warmth’.

Housing or homelessness, a report published by the Faculty of Public Health Medicine in April 1991, estimated excess mortality among the elderly of 40,000 per annum due to the cold in winter. A British Medical Journal series on housing and health found that poor people spend twice as much on average on heating as the well off, commenting that ‘fuel poverty exists because the people with the least to spend on heating are often housing in homes that are hardest to heat’.

An unlikely champion of poor people’s right to affordable warmth could be Offer, the electricity regulator. In a recent consultative paper on ‘energy efficiency’ they suggest that electricity companies could make ‘investment funds’ available for small businesses and low income households to carry out energy efficiency measures like insulation.

Offer have asked for comments by June. The health lobby should take an interest.