The new Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary has signalled her support for tackling fuel poverty, but she’s inherited a Warm Homes Plan that is yet to be finalised and, as Andrew Warren warns in an article on the Business Green website, energy efficiency jobs are being lost as the wait to fill the policy vacuum continues. All countries are trying to address fuel poverty so there are important messages for all of us.
Miatta Fahnbulleh wants to tackle fuel poverty – now she has to deliver
The arrival of Miatta Fahnbulleh as the new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero has led to much trawling of her pre-Ministerial statements. Noticeably, parts of the media have highlighted how she has previously called for a net zero economy to be achieved by 2035, rather than the internationally recognised date of 2050.
But for the initial 14 months after the 2024 general election, she was a junior minister in the same department she is now running. Amongst her main designated responsibilities was for ‘energy consumers’. And it was in this role that she sought to create an overtly far more ambitious policy than her predecessor, Ed Miliband, had ever sought. By doing so, she was quite deliberately making it clear that delivering net zero would only ever be achieved with a far greater all-round commitment to social justice.
She stated that the recently adopted official method of measuring fuel poverty in England was completely wrong. It understated the problem entirely. In practice, there are now more than three times as many households who should be regarded as being in fuel poverty than recent governments had claimed. And that the position was getting steadily worse.
In February 2025, Fahnbulleh launched a formal public consultation into fuel poverty policy. Such documents often include a foreword from the relevant minister, stating existing government policy and how the proposals in the consultation might expedite delivery. All too frequently these are bland bureaucrat-drafted homilies, broadly explaining how the policy in question will take us “onwards and upwards to a brighter future”. But not this time.
Drafted by Miatta
This time, the Minister very much drafted her own Ministerial Foreword. And it stated unequivocally that, “the number of households, required to spend more than 10 per cent of their income after housing costs on their energy bills, soared to 8.9 million in 2023, more than double the previous rate”.
That “10 per cent of disposable income after housing benefits” figure is the long-standing agreed definition of fuel poverty, as still pursued by all three devolved administrations. It was also the definition employed by the Blair Government in 2001 when it passed the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act. This Act set out a timetable (long since breached) by when fuel poverty would be, not just ameliorated, but eliminated.
However, when 11 months later, a new Fuel Poverty Strategy was finally issued, on 27th January 2026, those ministerial numbers had suddenly altered. Drastically so.
How great is the problem of fuel poverty in England now officially considered to be? Extraordinarily, page 36 of the strategy states blandly ‘”there were 2.7 million households in fuel poverty in 2024″. Very different from those 8.9 million households directly identified by Fahnbulleh in her consultation document.
Compounding the problem, on page 17 of the subsequent official Warm Homes Plan 2026, launched by then Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, that same lower figure was repeated.
Because by this stage Fahnbulleh was no longer an Energy Minister, having been moved to the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government. Her replacement as Minister for Energy Consumers, Martin McCluskey, even referred to this curious new 2.7 million figure in his own Ministerial Foreword for the new Fuel Poverty Strategy.
Downward spiral
But the downward spiral did not stop there. As Ron Bailey states on page 143 of his magisterial new book, Institutionalised Deceit, Taking the Lid off Westminster Governance, published this June by CDP, the Executive Summary of the 2026 Fuel Poverty Strategy states that, “this new fuel poverty strategy seeks to ensure that one million households are supported to achieve warm homes”. And nothing more.
The reason for the difference? The government is apparently using a new definition of fuel poverty, achieved by “measuring fuel poverty confirming the Low-Income Low Energy Efficiency (LILEE) measure”. An esoteric definition, dreamed up by an academic economist subsequently knighted for his ‘services’. A definition used by absolutely nobody else anywhere in Europe. And a definition firmly rejected by the official Fuel Poverty Advisory Group for England when proposed (full disclosure: I was a member of FPAG for nine years during this period).
For the past decade, the main energy saving programmes have not been funded by the government, at least not in England. All three of the devolved nations have long funded energy saving programmes for their low-income citizens. We did so in England , until the Coalition government abandoned the enormously successful Warm Front programme. Instead the programme, called the Energy Company Obligation, or ECO for short, was undertaken under the auspices of those who sell electricity or gas.
Since its launch in January 2013, ECO supported installing approximately 4.1 million energy efficiency measures across Great Britain. Helping to reduce energy bills and keep families and their children warm through the winter months. For the past decade, this has been the main driver to help reduce fuel poverty. But not yet to eliminate it.
And then, in her final budget in November 2025, the then – Chancellor Reeves decided without warning to stop that Obligation altogether. Simply in order to be able to claim that scrapping this (socially responsible) measure would take £150 off the average fuel bill. In practice, it already looks as though fuel bills will drop by a far lower amount, just £117 on average.
Consequently, since March there has no longer been any requirement placed upon any of the energy suppliers to help their customers save fuel. In its place we have a void. Even though the new Warm Homes Plan signals there may be some equivalent future government-funded schemes for the sector, the anticipated 12 to 18-month timeline before these reach delivery raises the critical question as to whether there be a supply chain still in place to deliver the government’s ambitions when the time comes for the new scheme to launch in full? How many of those 130,000 tradespeople who were, according to the Office for National Statistics, working in this sector in 2024 will still be in employment?
Job losses mounting
According to a recent industry survey undertaken by the Installation Assurance Authority Federation, a leading representative body in the retrofit sector, a staggering 19,800 skilled professionals have already been made redundant, following the former Chancellor’s Budget announcement. A further 79,000 are estimated to be made redundant within the next 12 months. Throughout the country comes news of long-established installation companies retrenching hard: 189 have gone into administration already this year.
So in the course of a few months, 8.9 million English households deemed to be in fuel poverty have been conveniently reduced by two-thirds, to 2.7 million. Thus, 6.2 million households have been officially defined out of fuel poverty.
Those people are not just impoverished. They appear to have been conveniently forgotten by a callous officialdom. But they will surely not have been forgotten by the new Secretary of State, who when she was previously running the New Economics Foundation, was always adamant about how net zero could only ever be achieved whilst eliminating fuel poverty. And under the established measurement of fuel poverty.
Fahnbulleh takes office when, for the first time in 30 years, her predecessor has left her with no designated nationwide programme to reduce the number of households in fuel poverty. But at least she appreciates the full scope of the challenge before her. She faces a daunting challenge, but I have every confidence she intends to deliver.
Andrew Warren chairs the British Energy Efficiency Federation and is a former special advisor to the House of Commons Environment Select Committee.
External link
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 