Agenda item

Resolved: the Committee agreed that it would share its views with Mayor and Cabinet, as follows –

·      The Committee recognises the potential to offset health and social care costs though a focus on fuel poverty. The Committee recommends that the Council corporately seeks funding (either from health, or elsewhere) for a designated fuel poverty officer.

7.1      Martin O’Brien (Climate Resilience Manager) introduced the report, the following key points were noted:

·         Local authorities were in a unique position to work on fuel poverty. This was particularly important given that there was very limited central government funding for work on fuel poverty.

·         There were many people living in homes with sub-standard (or none existent) heating.

·         The Council had the ability to work with housing, social care, public health and partners in the community to improve residents’ lives.

·         Many local authorities had given up on carrying out work in this area.

·         The home energy conservation act was the only statutory requirement on local authorities in this area of work. It required local authorities to produce a statement every two years about the work that they were carrying out, but it did not prescribe what that work should be.

·         Funding for fuel poverty had been a challenge in Lewisham, however this had recently begun to change, partly as a result of work by the Greater London Authority (GLA).

·         Lewisham was leading a partnership of London boroughs and community partners to deliver an advice and referral partnership across the south east. Officers had also been able to access funding for vulnerable residents from the GLA and combine it with funding from the energy company obligation to provide up to £7000 for households in fuel poverty (for heating, insulation and support services).

·         Work was also taking place with the GLA and Veolia to progress a heat network from the South East London Combined Heat and Power Plant (SELCHP).

·         A community energy fund would be launched to provide small grants and funding for local groups to run localised initiatives and install renewable energy.

·         Work was taking place to engage with vulnerable residents in order to ensure that they could access the available funding.

7.2      Martin O’Brien responded to questions from the Committee, the following key points were noted:

·         There was one officer working full time on home energy conservation.

·         There was good news about the amount of investment that had been accessed for residents.

·         Carbon emissions had reduced in Lewisham since 2005. The figures were produced by central government and covered a range of activities. The Council could not claim that it was responsible for the reduction in emissions – but it had contributed to the decrease.

·         There was lots of work taking place across the country to develop local authority led energy suppliers or supply deals. This was challenging for local authorities to do well.

·         There had been huge growth in the number of small energy suppliers.

·         The implementation of smart meters should help people on pre-payment to control their energy costs.

·         Previously, energy company obligation funding had only been targeted at people on benefits. The government had introduced flexible eligibility and given local authorities a role in designating vulnerable households.

·         The Council had made 50 declarations (for Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley) using data to identify the types of property that would benefit from the funding and aligning this with people who were eligible for the funding.

·         The Council had initiated a scheme with South East London Community energy to engage with vulnerable households and to ensure that they could access the funding that was available.

·         It was hoped that the scheme would be self-financing.

·         The flexible approach to identifying and allocating households in need meant that there were a number of ways that the Council could support vulnerable households.

·         The Council’s main aim was to use frontline staff to identify and support households in need.

·         Officers would work with the team that were developing the new icasework system for councillors to determine whether there were ways that councillors could refer casework to the south east London partnership scheme.

·         Officers recognised that they needed to access external funding to carry out work.

·         Fuel poverty was a public health issue and quality heating acted as preventative medicine – which could save the local health service money by reducing the use of health services.

7.3      Resolved: the Committee agreed that it would share its views with Mayor and Cabinet, as follows –

·         The Committee recognises the potential to offset health and social care costs though a focus on fuel poverty. The Committee recommends that the Council corporately seeks funding (either from health, or elsewhere) for a designated fuel poverty officer.