Use carbon tax revenue to end fuel poverty, says Duncan Stewart

REVENUE raised from the carbon tax should be used to tackle fuel poverty, award-winning architect and RTÉ presenter, Duncan Stewart, said yesterday.

Mr Stewart, presenter of About The House and Eco Eye, said the tax had imposed an unsustainable burden on many, low-income households experiencing fuel poverty.

There was, he said, a danger that the carbon tax could become a regressive tax, penalising those least able to pay it.

“While the carbon tax is in all our long-term interests, it is important to ring-fence some of the revenue to ensure it is used to help those in fuel poverty,” said Mr Stewart, when he opened the Energy Action Conference in Dublin Castle.

Mr Stewart said the number of households experiencing fuel poverty had risen significantly from 2009, when there were 340,000.

It is estimated that the number of households experiencing fuel poverty increased to almost 375,000 last year and could reach 400,000 in 2011.

He pointed out that up to one-fifth of homes were now experiencing fuel poverty at a time when 90% of the country’s energy needs were imported and €6 billion was leaving the country every year to pay for them.

Calling for a review of the fuel allowance scheme, Mr Stewart said there was a need to move away the unsustainable importation of fossil fuels, pointing out that up to 4,000 jobs could be created if the money was diverted into upgrading homes.

A leading international expert said it was extremely difficult to identify homes that were fuel poor and was concerned about the effect liberalising the energy markets had on people, particularly those who were elderly.

“People who don’t switch to lower tariffs tend to be the elderly. They end up subsidising those who do switch by continuing to pay the higher tariffs” said Brenda Boardman, Emeritus Fellow of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

The elderly also tended not to “self refer” themselves to agencies that could help them and who failed to take up benefits they were entitled to.

And, after many years, she had come to the conclusion that free insulating schemes should not be supported because it was the better-off who tended to benefit most.

She believed more accurate monitoring of fuel poverty was needed to ensure resources were deployed where they were most needed.

Bríd Horan, executive director of ESB Services and Electric Ireland, said the ESB upgraded 3,000 homes in the last two years as part of a drive against fuel poverty.