Fuel poverty is bad for your health and the economy...

A couple of weeks ago, John Healey one of Labour’s (many) former Housing Ministers spoke at the National Housing Federation conference – sharing with the audience some of his thoughts on the state of the housing sector and the impact of the coalition’s policies.

As you would expect, there were some pretty clear criticisms in his speech of the spending cuts and the impact they will have on the housing sector in particular and the economy in general.

Party politics to one side though, I thought that he made some interesting observations about the links between health and housing, making the point for example that poorly heated or insulated homes can lead to hypothermia and ultimately to deaths and how overcrowded homes can lead to the rapid spread of infectious diseases.
Consequently the quality of our housing stock has a direct causal link with the health of the nation, a link which not only has social implications but also economic consequences. For example, the Audit Commission calculated that for every £1 spent on housing support for vulnerable people, £2 would be saved in the reduced costs of health services, tenancy failure, crime and residential care. To coin a well worn cliché then, if a cross-department view were taken, such spending could be seen as sensible investment rather than as a pure cost. Supporting this view, the Chartered Institute for Environmental Health reported that health costs of £600 million arise every year directly from poor housing.

Healey asserts that the economic benefits go wider than this though and that for every £1m of public investment in housing refurbishment, 17 jobs are created and that completing the Decent Homes programme would support 54,000 jobs.

He also argues that the separation of health and housing responsibilities makes it much harder for governments to make sound and sensible policies, but does say that the last Labour government was effective in more closely linking the two areas - with the Decent Homes programme affecting more than 1.4 million homes and the encouragement of closer local working between housing and health providers (citing as an example the recent ‘Healthy Homes’ initiative launched jointly by Liverpool Council and Liverpool PCT which targets the health and housing needs of families living in 25,000 homes across the city).

Furthermore, a report released this week states that between 2004 and 2009 domestic electricity prices increased by over 75%, while gas prices increased by over 122% over the same period. This suggests to me that it’s not just our existing housing stock to be concerned with but in future all houses will not only be valued by location and numbers of bedrooms but also their running costs.

As a company with close links to the social and private housing sector, we’d certainly endorse some of these views. Products such as our own Gebrik insulating brick cladding system not only deliver performance advantages (better insulation, improved aesthetics, reduced energy costs etc) but can also provide better living environments for home owners and tenants – with a consequent benefit to both short and long term health.

I have to confess that I don’t remember this argument being made by Labour when the party was in power, but it does make interesting reading – and it’s hard to argue with the logic of more closely linking health and housing. Interestingly when Aneurin Bevan led the legislation to set up the NHS through Parliament in 1946, he was Secretary of State for Health and Housing; maybe he was on to something….