The Future of Low Carbon Heat For Off-Gas Buildings

Consultation Response

Credits — Common Weal, Glasgow Caledonian University, Energy Poverty Research Intitative

Overview

A response to the Scottish Government’s Call for Evidence on the future of heating rural buildings.

As an overall commentary on the issues associated with low carbon heat for off-gas buildings we refer readers to our recently published policy paper on this topic, ‘Carbon-free, Poverty-free: Heating options for rural Scotland’, please consider this paper our full response to this call for evidence.

We would note that the term off-gas is wrongly determined as being over 63m from the gas network. Barriers such as railways and multi-storey urban properties may exclude households from accessing the mains gas despite their proximity to the network. However, off-gas properties are predominately rural which are also more likely to be in fuel poverty than urban households. The challenges these households face are exacerbated by their geographical isolation as well as their potential social isolation. We commend the Scottish Government in this call for evidence as they are recognising that there are social inequities that are not being addressed effectively through current policy responses. We have uncovered variations in behavioural geographies towards heating homes that demonstrate that behavioural patterns exacerbate rural fuel poverty. We have also illustrated that current proxies for fuel poverty, used in targeting funding, favour urban areas to the disadvantage of rural householders.

We have tested the correlation of the SIMD income domain with fuel poverty and show, in Section 2.2.1 of the attached document, that this is the second worst SIMD domain for identifying fuel poor households.