Throughout 2025 (the seventh year Campaign Collective has coordinated the Coalition), fuel poverty remained widespread and deeply entrenched across. Around 12.1m households continued to face unaffordable energy bills, growing debt and life in cold damp homes. The ongoing crisis is driven by energy market design, the impacts of five winters of the energy bills crisis and poor housing quality.
Against this backdrop, the Coalition focused its work on immediate affordability, ending discriminatory practices and driving longer-term structural reform to prevent fuel poverty being locked in for another generation.
- Affordability & Discrimination
A core focus of the Coalition’s work in 2025 was highlighting that energy bills remain far above pre-crisis levels and are unaffordable for low-income households, disabled people, older people and those with higher energy needs.
The Coalition consistently used official data to demonstrate the scale of the problem, including the continued rise in household energy debt, and warned that debt levels risk becoming permanently embedded without decisive action.
The Coalition repeatedly argued that short-term bill reductions alone were insufficient and that affordability must be judged against household incomes and essential energy needs, not headline averages.
Throughout the year, the Coalition raised concerns about discrimination within the energy system, particularly affecting:
- RTS meter switch over – and a failure of Ofgem to implement a restitution scheme – leaving households out of pocket.
- Prepayment meter users facing higher effective costs and more punitive debt recovery.
- Households without smart meters who are excluded from “best tariffs”.
- Vulnerable consumers unable to navigate complex tariff choices or switching processes.
The Coalition stressed that access to the best available tariffs and protections should not depend on digital literacy, payment method or meter type. Work around standing charges, benchmark consumption assumptions and supplier practices consistently fed into this theme.
In 2025 the Coalition continued to press for the introduction of a social tariff as an essential short- to medium-term reform to protect low-income and financially vulnerable households. This was framed as a necessary complement, not an alternative, to wider market reform.
Alongside this, the Coalition highlighted weaknesses and gaps in existing support schemes, including:
- Warm Home Discount eligibility and adequacy
- Cold Weather and Winter Fuel Payments failing to reflect actual need or costs
- The absence of a permanent, funded mechanism to deal with legacy energy debt
The Coalition welcomed steps that restored or protected bill support, while warning against policy reversals that undermined trust and left households anxious about meeting basic heating needs.
- Longer-term Reforms & Energy Efficiency
Beyond crisis support, the Coalition placed strong emphasis on the need for meaningful energy market reform that reduces bills sustainably and fairly. Throughout 2025, it argued that the current system continues to expose households to volatile wholesale prices, high standing charges and regressive cost recovery mechanisms.
The Coalition consistently linked affordability, energy security and decarbonisation, highlighting that reform must lower costs for households rather than shifting new policy and infrastructure costs onto those already struggling.
A major strand of work in 2025 focused on influencing the development of the Government’s Warm Homes Plan and engagement with the review of fuel poverty strategy and related heat and network reforms.
The Coalition set out clear principles, including:
- A “worst first” or “warmth first” approach, prioritising households in deepest fuel poverty rather than chasing easier or cheaper upgrades.
- Measuring success by warm, dry, affordable homes rather than installation counts or headline efficiency metrics.
- Ensuring that fuel poverty considerations are embedded across housing, health, energy and climate policy.
The Coalition also warned that proposed or rumoured reductions in energy-efficiency funding risked undermining long-term goals and locking households into cold, damp homes with permanently high bills. Meanwhile, the Coalition repeatedly raised concerns about whether existing and planned programmes would genuinely reach those most in need.
Overall assessment of activity in 2025
We have worked with the University of York to create a measure based on income, which suggests that 12.1m UK households are in fuel poverty (10% of income on energy bills after housing costs (AHC)) and 5m spend 20% of income on energy AHC.
There have been policy successes in terms of securing a £15bn Warm Homes Plan commitment, the restoration of Winter Fuel Payments to most pensioners, a partial extension of the Warm Homes Discount and measures in the Budget to start to bring down the structural costs on energy bills. However, government policy delays and failure of previous energy efficiency schemes continue to have devastating consequences.
In 2025 the Coalition continued to demonstrate a broad support for an end to fuel poverty from across poverty, health, disability, debt, community energy and green groups and academics. It has strengthened its role as a consistent voice linking day-to-day affordability pressures with the need for long-term structural reform.
We continue to collaborate with other related campaigns, such as the Renters Reform Coalition, End Child Poverty Coalition and are exploring closer links with housing campaigners.
As previously, the Coalition work plan remains flexible in order to respond to events, however the group continued to have significant impact on the debate around the crisis.
Additional and extensive funding for the Coalition was also maintained via the Warm This Winter campaign (until end of March 2025) and then by a significant grant from the ECF and additional financial support from Uplift and E3G. This funding has ensured we were able to secure support for the coordinator from two Campaign Collective colleagues who work on campaign coordination and social media. The funding also enables us to deliver activity above and beyond the general coordination and specific activity which is funded by members’ kind subscriptions to Coalition membership. However, this funding is likely to be reduced in 2026 and work is underway to grow the membership base to offset these reductions.
Key Performance Indicators
There were over 55,000 webpage views from 46,000 visitors (up from 49,000+ web page views from 30,000+ visitors in 2024), this is up from 6,000 views / 3,000 users before the energy bills crisis in 2020. By far the most popular pages remain the information about fuel poverty, energy firm profits data and information about excess winter deaths.
In the media, the Coalition has been regularly quoted and such has been the demand for spokespeople on fuel poverty, that the co-ordinator has again had to undertake media interviews with major news channels, including BBC Breakfast, BBC Rip Off Britain, Sky News and regular appearances on GB News, LBC and Talk TV.
29 news stories were issued in 2025 (2024 = 54, 2023 = 79, 2022 = 68) which is down slightly due to the end of the Warm This Winter campaign which funded a lot of original research for us to use. Since April we have instead prioritised reactive media comments linked to events and other organisations’ announcements, so far over 50 media comments and quotes have been issued (since August we are now posting them on the website).
This resulted in over 6,063 media mentions (2024 = 12,400) with a circulation / audience of over 8.1bn (2024 = 11.2bn / 2023 = 10,000 / 2.8bn, 2022 = 4,308 / 1.5bn).
This means that every UK adult had an opportunity to hear about the work of the Coalition more than 153 times in 2024 (2024 = 211, 2023 = 53, 2022 = 26). And the reach of coverage featuring our members will mean that what we report here is just the tip of the iceberg of our cumulative efforts.
Ownership and decisions by X continue to cause issues with our social media reach which has declined again (when excluding paid-for content). However, the follower count for our channels has increased with LinkedIn and BlueSky continuing to grow in effectiveness. Mastodon and Threads have proved less useful with the EFPC Mastodon channel being paused.
The success of the campaigns by Coalition members has led to increased formal correspondence, with at least 39 formal exchanges with the regulator, Government and Ministers (2024 = 34). All formal correspondence is now published online: https://www.endfuelpoverty.org.uk/news/reports-and-correspondence/.
Our increased levels of correspondence has had a direct impact with the Coalition coordinator invited again to give verbal evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Work & Pensions Pensioner Poverty Inquiry.
While formal meetings with MPs have been relatively few, we continue to maintain correspondence with Members of Parliament and – from tracking of email opens and social media – we have 30 who are regularly engaged with our content. This resulted in 4 mentions in Parliament proceedings (2024 = 11, 2023 = 1).
The coordinator also spoke at events, including the European Action Coalition on Housing assembly and took part in meetings with wider stakeholder groups to discuss joint campaigning after the election.