Fuel Poverty Lab: Week Two

Apologies that our update is slightly late - we were out and about on Friday.

In fact, that's our update really. We have 10 more weeks to tame our wicked problem so we are taking time to talk to as many people as possible. Customers, colleagues and people who work in the field of energy efficiency. 

The one big thing that's emerging for us is we need to avoid onesize-fits-all solutions. Our customers all heat and use their homes differently with varying income levels - and our work needs to acknowledge that.

For instance - we visited a customer this week who was experiencing damp and mould. Seemingly she was the only person in her block to be having the problem. But the family were using fuel in different way to their neighbours. It would be easy to jump to 'blaming the customer' for this - when in fact it's more the issue that the property may need modifications to make it more suitable for their lifestyle. 

What if every customer could have a conversation with us about their lifestyle, income and attitude to warmth - that we could match with a bespoke offer?

In other news:

• We are avoiding going off and conducting separate tests and trying to tap into things we are already doing or thinking about. Watch for an update on some of these later in the week
• There’s a raft of existing partnerships that we have not fully tapped into. We’re now collating these for a quick wins action plan.
• Then there’s a list of future partnerships that need exploring – who are the high value ones we’d want to have more strategic links with?
• We’ve started the quick downloads with key colleagues and they’ve already unearthed some nuggets which we’ll include in a future update.

Generally things are starting to take shape now and by the end of this week we want to be able to present a timetable of the way forward, and the likely things we’ll be testing.