200 a day will die because lack of heating

Two hundred elderly, will die in Britain of cold-related diseases every day this winter, according to Age UK.

"The fact that these 'excess' deaths occur in winter makes it clear that they are due directly to cold," the organisation's research manager, Philip Rossall, said. "And the fact that other, colder countries have lower excess winter deaths means that there is no reason that they are not preventable."

There were 26,156 excess winter deaths during 2009-10.

A report by Britain's leading academic expert on poverty and inequality, Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics, found that 2,700 people among the 4.8 million in England and Wales living in fuel poverty (defined as spending more than 10% of income on heat and light) died in the winter of 2008-09 as a direct result – a steady increase for the third year running. From 1997-98, on average 18% of the UK's winter deaths were excess, compared to the 10-12% in typically colder countries such as Finland, Sweden and Norway. The figure for Germany and the Netherlands was 11%.

Age UK makes a distinction between deaths directly due to fuel poverty and what the charity calls "excess winter deaths" – resulting from illnesses caused or exacerbated by cold.

"The way to measure the problem is excess winter deaths," said Rossall. "These are deaths caused by the impact on health of cold. Of course, we see a warning light with a report saying that 2,700 people are dying in fuel poverty. But what we are saying is that this is not the only relevant figure. It doesn't measure the scale of the problem."

The cost of heating an adequately sized house is estimated to be £1,300 a year. So if you are on pension credit of £7,000, you are very fuel-poor indeed.

Most of our elderly people now live in poverty.

Yet the richest 10 per cent now receives 31 per cent of national income and owns almost half of the country's personal assets, while the poorest 10 per cent takes home just 1 per cent of the total income.