In February 2019, this newspaper spoke to two women who raised their newborn babies in flats with barely functioning heating.
The Aylesbury Estate mothers relied on fan heaters to keep their children warm in a month which saw temperatures drop as low as -4. These aren’t isolated incidents, but the reality for many of the 17,000 Southwark households connected to communal heating networks.
Communal heating networks, otherwise known as district heating, are systems that distribute heat to multiple properties from a single source. They are often more efficient and cost-effective than individual heating systems, but many of Southwark’s ageing networks are deteriorating.
Southwark district heating households to receive energy bill support
In 2019, Fuel Poverty Action and a collective of tenants’ and residents’ associations said that most of Southwark’s communal heating networks were obsolete. That proved a prescient prediction. Since 2019, the Newington, Aylesbury, Brandon and Rouel Road estates are just some to have been beset by outages, particularly during the winter.
The council is working to fix this. A successful 2019 feasibility study kickstarted the installation of renewable heat pumps in some Southwark estates such as the Newington. The idea is to use the water from the London aquifer and use heat pump technology to take the naturally heated water to warm homes.
While in the long-term this may prove to be a clever way of warming residents while saving on money and CO2 emissions, it’s been a bumpy start. Brandon Estate residents are still complaining that the water runs cold and the Newington Estate was plagued with issues last winter.
Given all these problems, it would have been a travesty if district heating residents had been excluded from government help this winter. Thankfully, it looks like they’ll be protected. But there is another issue at play here – the failure of the government properly to reassure district heating residents.
When media outlets began reporting that district heating networks might be excluded, several people called our paper, worrying about themselves and their neighbours. It was only by trawling through a government press release, and reading a line twelve paragraphs down, that we were able to find out the government was pledging support for district heating recipients.
Perhaps this is a symptom of an unstable political establishment. Because of the leadership race, the UK was one of the last European countries to announce an energy support package. So rather than carefully informing the public of the protections offered by the energy support bill, people were left confused about what they would be entitled to.
There are over 200,000 homes heated by district heating networks in the UK and these are disproportionately in Southwark.
They’ll need to be properly informed and protected over the coming months, not left out in the cold.