How we’re helping vulnerable customers most at risk of fuel poverty

When struggling with day-to-day living issues, many people don’t feel comfortable seeking help from mainstream sources, such as government organisations. Instead, they prefer to turn to trusted local or need-specific grassroots organisations, such as community-based support groups, faith groups or play centres, which don’t have the capacity or skills to support their service users with energy or financial issues. They can also find it difficult to access potential funding streams to meet their community needs.

By partnering with Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) to deliver our Safe and Warm Community Scheme, we’re able to help these organisations supporting financially vulnerable communities with both funding and skills to provide energy advice and energy safeguarding services.

Since launching the scheme, we’ve provided 43 grassroot organisations with the skills and resources to help frontline support workers lift hard-to-reach households out of fuel poverty and provide energy safeguarding services. So far, we’ve helped almost 19,000 vulnerable households with energy triage and crisis support.

In addition to identifying small organisations that are well placed to support communities, CSE helps these organisations with initial funding applications and project implementation. We work closely with them to understand the challenges faced by local communities and, as a direct result, we’ve run engaging online and in-person workshops for representatives and their frontline workers to ensure each organisation gets the support they need to deliver to their clients.

By building in more networking events, we’re opening up opportunities for both ourselves and funded partners to share insight and best practice, collaborate on solutions, make local connections, and learn about regional and locally relevant offers and grants.

Sharing knowledge and convening partners fosters innovation, and we’ve seen specialist support organisations apply innovative approaches and engagement methods to working with vulnerable people. For example, Community Drug & Alcohol Recovery Services (CDARS) integrated energy advice into gardening and craft sessions to build trust with their service users. Similarly, the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association integrated energy advice into a boat trip to address low uptake in their home energy workshops.

A frontline worker from Network of International Women for Brighton & Hove said: “This training and information proved to be invaluable resources for our organisation. They have significantly enhanced our capacity to provide impactful energy advice confidently and safely to our customers. The field of energy advice often contains a wealth of information, sometimes with conflicting advice. However, we found the resources provided comprehensive and well-suited to our specific needs.”

Citizens Advice Scotland is the largest independent advice service in Scotland and the go-to agency for households in crisis. We’ve partnered with them on a growing portfolio of projects across Scotland, helping us extend our support to households who need it most across the country. Citizens Advice Scotland’s holistic approach allows us to combine specialist fuel poverty advice with guidance and information on other issues that affect households’ health and wellbeing.

Through our partnership, we aim to support up to 6,400 vulnerable households living in fuel poverty and in harder to reach communities through dedicated and skilled energy advisers. Since March 2022, we’ve helped over 4,690 Scottish households struggling with energy costs in the most deprived parts of our network, helping 2,217 vulnerable households with their energy needs this year alone.

We’ve achieved this by building on the learning of our 2021-22 pilot with Citizens Advice in the north of Scotland, developing our Safe and Warm programme to expand the service into regional communities identified as being in greatest need through our Vulnerability Index and where there is no existing dedicated energy advice service.

As part of this programme, we also provided energy advice training for 700 frontline workers, covering topics including energy efficiency, the Priority Services Register and carbon monoxide awareness. It’s through this training we see the most vulnerable customers referred into the service. Frontline workers will support an average of 57 clients each, leaving a legacy and a reach of almost 40,000 people. We’ve gained real-time insight into customer need and gaps in services across Scotland and identified the need for in-depth caseworkers to deal with the complexity of issues.

A Citizens Advice Scotland service user said: “The energy adviser helped us to apply for things we were entitled to – unbelievable. Getting a new boiler and radiators, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. Getting benefits we never knew about and debt written off. We can never thank her enough for her assistance.”