Abstract | Designing public retrofit programmes for tackling fuel poverty is a complex, global challenge affecting vulnerable households. With a focus on governance and retrofits programmes in London since 2021, we present an empirical investigation of how health and socio-economic inequalities shape the challenge of fuel poverty Mixed methods are employed to analyse the inter-relationships between national metrics and local policy, as well as domestic retrofit programmes across various scales. Our review of fuel poverty metrics identifies limitations in how far national and local policies incorporate inequalities, especially in the context of rising energy costs and climate change impacts. In London, there are related shortfalls in the operationalisation of the London Building Stock Model (LBSM). While this tool maps the Energy Performance Certificate of homes, this requires cross-referencing with additional socio-economic databases to identify fuel-poor households, which are not publicly available. Further accountability issues exist due to the lack of binding targets from the Greater London Authority, and private-sector retrofits are mainly the responsibility of housing associations, which are not legally-obliged to report on energy retrofits and fuel poverty. The study concludes with the need for inclusive metrics and retrofit programmes by incorporating wider inequality indicators to identify accurately households in fuel poverty. |
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