Feature

A choice of heating or eating

A community-led housing project in Glasgow runs counter to the usual ‘lifestyle’ solutions to ill health. Shona Duncan reports

Fungus spores, solar power and community spirit seem an unlikely combination when it comes to transforming attitudes to public health. Yet they have played an important role in contributing to a pilot project set to challenge accepted health promotion wisdom — that Scotland’s appalling health record can be laid simply at the door of diet, smoking and individual lifestyle.

Monitoring of the scheme, a demonstration housing project, seems set to confirm the views of many ordinary people, that one of the major causes of ill-health in the UK today is poverty.

For as long as many families can remember, health in Easthall, part of Glasgow’s Greater Easterhouse housing scheme, has been a nightmare. Older people have seemed prone to coronary heart disease; children have been vulnerable to repeated infections and colds; sick children become sick adults.

Health promotion experts have long blamed the situation on people’s lifestyles. But residents believe their freezing-cold, damp houses make illness inevitable and recovery impossible.

‘For years, the only families flourishing in Easthall were germs and fungus,’ says Easthall Residents Association health spokesperson Cathy McCormack. People haven’t just had to throw out mouldy food. They’ve had mould growing on their furniture and on the clothes in their wardrobe.

The problem is that hundreds of thousands of houses in the West of Scotland were never designed for the country’s severe winter climate. The buildings, often described as ‘pneumonia houses’, have little or no insulation and no central heating.

‘We realised that if boiling the kettle, breathing or doing the normal things a family does caused dampness or condensation, there had to be something wrong,’ McCormack explains.

The only way many people have survived has been by keeping their heating on all day in the sitting room and virtually living there, only going into a damp kitchen or freezing bedroom to make a cup of tea or go to bed. The result has been family stress and fuel poverty.

An energy audit in Easthall showed that people were paying on average £20 per week heating their homes, and the poorer families — for example those who were unemployed and spending more time at home — were having as much as £35 a week deducted from their Social Security benefit to pay for fuel. It was calculated that in the winter people would have to pay £60 per week to generate enough heat to overcome condensation dampness. The choice was between ‘heating or eating’ says McCormack.

It was no surprise, then, for people to be told their city was deemed the heart attack capital of the world. What was surprising was that the situation was blamed on their diet and lifestyle.

After years of writing, lobbying, organising community drama, and harassing politicians at district, regional, Scottish and EC level, the residents association — and environmental and architectural experts they involved as allies — managed to establish a 36-house Passive Solar Energy Demonstration Project in Easthall. A 36-family control group was also identified to allow proper health monitoring to take place.

The demonstration flats, completed in 1992, had their wall cavities filled and external walls super-insulated. Solar panels on the roofs pre-heated water and circulated hot air down into the stair wells so houses didn’t lose heat when their doors were opened. The verandas were glazed to create another source of circulating heat.

The result, says McCormack, is that some people now pay only £7 per week for heating and constant hot water, and they only have to use their heating for three or four months of the year. They can use all of their rooms — and now they can afford to eat a healthy diet.

One young woman who previously suffered from chronic asthma no longer needs treatment. The woman’s mother claims she is no longer troubled by arthritis. ‘Another tenant said that she had no health problems with her child born after she moved to the demonstration house, whereas in her previous damp house her older boy was constantly ill,’ adds McCormack.

The contrast is not lost on her. ‘No wonder so many people have high blood pressure and high levels of cholesterol,’ she says. ‘It’s not just because of the stress of living in such conditions, but also because of having to go constantly from a hot environment to a freezing cold one. That also puts a stress on the body.’

To back up her views she quotes the work of medical researcher Dr Evan Lloyd, whose studies suggest that ‘environmental cold stress’ is an important factor in the high rates of ischaemic heart disease in the West of Scotland.

‘We don’t need keep-fit campaigns,’ McCormack concludes. ‘We need homes fit to live in and incomes or benefits that prevent us having to choose between dying from hypothermia or from malnutrition. This isn’t the end. This is only the beginning’.

In April the government added VAT to the price of domestic fuel. As healthmatters went to press Cathy McCormack was in New York lobbying the UN on behalf of the Scottish Academic Network for Environmental Change and the many communities in Scotland who believe fuel poverty and bad housing are issues of concern not only for the developing world.