Welsh government set to give £500,000 to Gypsies and Travellers to help with winter fuel bills
A Gypsy/Traveller charity has welcomed the decision by the Welsh government to give £500,000 support to Gypsies and Travellers living in fuel poverty this winter – but has warned that this is just a sticking plaster as there are deep rooted problems that need fixing to bring down fuel bills on Traveller sites.
The support is split into £300,000 funding for Welsh councils and a further £200,000 to the Fuel Bank Foundation and is intended to support local Gypsies and Travellers. The funding specifically for Gypsies and Travellers living in fuel poverty is part of a range of packages from the Welsh government designed to help all Welsh people living in fuel poverty - as fuel prices are expected to continue to rise this winter.
Romany Gypsies and Travellers living on council-run Traveller sites across the UK are especially vulnerable to high energy prices, as many do not have a domestic supply of electricity and are suppled instead by councils. This means that they miss out on competitive domestic tariffs given by commercial energy suppliers.
A double whammy that often drives Welsh Gypsies and Travellers living on council-run sites into fuel poverty is that they also must use expensive bottled gas or oil for heating, as many sites also do not have mains gas supplies.
Although the few new council-run Traveller sites that are created now days often have electricity grids designed to support domestic supply and mains gas supplies built in - most of the Welsh Traveller sites, like those in England, are decades old with decaying infrastructure, making them unfit to be connected to the National Grid.
The cost of refurbishing an old council-run site to allow domestic supply can run into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds per site - depending on its size and the state of the electricity grids built beneath it. The same is true for digging in mains gas supplies.
Many council-run Traveller site electric grids are not part of the National Grid and it is the responsibility of Welsh councils to maintain them - which they often fail to do.
Councils supplying electricity to their Traveller site tenants are also not regulated by the energy regulator OFGEM - which the Travellers’ Times has called a “national scandal” which affects many Gypsies and Travellers living on sites across the UK.
TGP, Cymru’s ‘Travelling Ahead’ project, who run the all-Wales Advice and Advocacy service working with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, welcomed the news - but warned that more needed to be done.
“Around half of those living on council pitches in Wales do not have an individual electricity supplier with their energy being provided by the council at commercial rates; this means people cannot choose their supplier, the supply is not regulated by OFGEM, there is no transparency or cap on charges and households cannot access fuel poverty help like other utility customers can,” said a spokesperson for Travelling Ahead.
“This is due to long standing structural inequalities, for example the National Grid not taking responsibility for the supply to many older sites in Wales and the lack of progress in improving and upgrading older sites in Wales - the costs to upgrade this infrastructure is huge, and whilst some councils are trying to make progress on this its people living on sites who are paying the price,” they added.
“The £300,000 Local Authority grant is being actively taken up by the 17 councils in Wales who have Gypsy and Traveller tenants on their local authority sites - this money is going directly to households to help with fuel costs this winter.”
"The additional £200,000 for the Fuel Bank Foundation is a positive commitment but this approach is not without its problems and has its own barriers for families accessing this fuel help:
- As an advocacy service we can make applications to the Fuel Bank Foundation as referral partners, and, this year we have been able to get over 150 top-up vouchers out to families, but this is a tiny percentage of the families that we know are going into debt, or without heating and lighting, over huge weekly energy costs. Some families report putting over £100 and more each week onto their meters and regularly self-disconnecting or going over into ‘emergency’ charges which then have to be paid back.
- The larger heat fund grants (which could provide oil or gas bottles for example) require a lot of personal and financial information to be gathered and are not easy to administer - to date there has only been a handful of applications for these we understand, despite the Fuel Bank Foundation working with organisations to improve take up and make this process easier.
- And the reality is that the same barriers that apply to those on old sites without individual supplies are barriers to applying for the fuel crisis top-up vouchers - if you don’t have an individual supply you can’t use these vouchers - so these families are also locked out of this support.
- This Welsh government fund is ringfenced for those on council sites we understand which also leaves the majority of those living on private sites without the ability to access this targeted funding.
"We are concerned that the additional £200,000 the Welsh Government have committed to the Fuel Bank is just not going to get out to the families that need it and that more resources need to be put into medium and longer term solutions to tackle inequalities, and upgrade sites, so they provide quality, affordable accommodation that allows tenants to access the same services, support, and choices as people living in houses."
Mike Doherty for TT News
(Photograph; Welsh Senned assembly building in Cardiff - by Michael Dibb, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135725316”