Three in four pensioners are living in a cold home

Just experimenting with one radiator in hall, dress like yeti and use heated throws. Disabled after blood cancer now 67. ‘Managed to get PC through volunteer attached to GP surgery. Get so cold and can’t get warm again even with 2 pairs socks and tights! Do sometimes use fan heater for short periods.

Sorry don’t agree I know of a large number of people who are struggling

My elderly friend told me she keeps her heating at 12 and if it’s cold turns it up to 14 because she is frightened of her bills , I hsve bought her an electric comforter . She is not entitled to pension credit because she saved but her state pension is small so she is careful , terrible state of affairs

Whitewavemark2

So are most of GN members living in cold homes?

Do a straw poll of friends - how many do you know live in cold homes.

I know of no one.

I honestly would prefer to receive Winter Fuel Allowance, but won’t freeze without it, and certainly don’t know of anyone who will. Obviously there will be people who will struggle to pay fuel bills, but I can’t buy into the media portrayal of all these old souls freezing to death.

We’re fortunate enough to be able to have our heating on as I suffer from several health conditions that are affected by the cold. Both my brothers are in the same situation as us. But I know of a few people who don’t put their heating on due to the costs. It’s currently 4 degrees so life must be miserable if you can’t afford heating. One lady we know goes to her bed at 6:30 pm, to avoid having to heat her living room, she takes a flask of tea with her.

HMRC

I agree that there are younger people and families living in cold homes but for practically 5 days of the week during the Winter months they are at work or at school where there is at least some warmth. A lot of pensioners (some that I know as just under the eligibility for PC) are at home all day in the cold homes. I am OK I have some money and I also get a small workplace pension. If they were to just use the HRMC and only give the Winter Fuel Allowance to those NOT paying any income tax it would solve a lot of the problems. It still wouldn't be completely fair but it would at least be better.

So am I

Whitewavemark2

So are most of GN members living in cold homes?

Do a straw poll of friends - how many do you know live in cold homes.

I know of no one.

I am one.

I am also living in a cold home. My thermostat is set to 16.5 degrees C. I am not in receipt of any benefits, am above the thresholds for pension credit etc, but food, energy costs, insurances etc are astronomical. I have a private pension as well as the state pension. It is not necessary to be destitute to miss the WFA. I go out every day and sit under blankets during the evenings.

I know of many others in a far worse situation than myself.

I am sitting in my 'study' preparing a Powerpoint for a u3a group and I am freezing as the heating is not on.
The gas fire is on downstairs for the benefit of my elderly cats, but if I appear they start yowling for food, which they then refuse to eat, and give me no peace.
I cannot blame the government for this, but I am careful with the heating and tend only to have it on first thing in the morning. I wear thermals under all my clothes and thick socks.

M0nica

Silverbrooks With due respect, as an ex Market Research Manager, you can get very accurate results from quite small sample sizes.

I do not want to blind people with mathematics, but this link explains how sampling and levels of confidence work and why a small sample can be relied on as representing a much larger group www.statista.com/statistics-glossary/definition/328/confidence_level/

Somewhere I have a little card wheel that calculates how big a sample size needs to be for a given population for the user to be confident that 95% of the time the result will represent the full population.

Yep! I used that all the time in my work.

Witzend

I’d be interested to know where they get that 3 out of 4 figure from. How many pensioners did they actually ask?

It is wrong! I would waste any more time on it.

Interestingly there is little difference between the level of pensioner poverty in Australia and U.K.

Presumably few suffer from much cold in Australia for obvious reasons, so I assume that the Australian government does not have to fund pensioners for winter weather, although excessive heat and flooding must be an issue. Does the Australian government fund pensioners for A/C? As excessive heat is probably more of a killer than excessive cold.

I’d be interested to know where they get that 3 out of 4 figure from. How many pensioners did they actually ask?

Silverbrooks With due respect, as an ex Market Research Manager, you can get very accurate results from quite small sample sizes.

I do not want to blind people with mathematics, but this link explains how sampling and levels of confidence work and why a small sample can be relied on as representing a much larger group www.statista.com/statistics-glossary/definition/328/confidence_level/

Somewhere I have a little card wheel that calculates how big a sample size needs to be for a given population for the user to be confident that 95% of the time the result will represent the full population.

nanna8

PoliticsNerd

Nanna8 the idea, that no one at anytime or for any reason should be cold, is ridiculous.

Nobody is sweeping anything under the carpet. Many try to give help where they can.

Your words. What I actually said was ‘ no one should be freezing cold because they can’t afford heating’ Please do not misquote.

I didn't misquote Nanna8. Most people would understand that "for any reason" would include their view that they couldn't afford heating. It is important that they get all the help they are entitled to that may free up monies presently earmarked for other necessities. This can then be used for fuel.

Have you managed to be cheerful, as I'm sure millions of struggling Australian homeowners are, with the 1% drop in interest rates? Also, I'm just finding out about a couple of novel (to me) ways of providing retirement flats/homes. I had to go out so didn't complete my "learning" but once I've caught up with my son and got more information I hope we can put it out for discussion.

Thanks for those figures, Silverbrooks. It's exactly like the face cream ads, isn't it?

When Thatcher began to deride Media Studies as a subject I feared that this sort of thing would happen*. People get completely taken in by headlines and media outlets with agendas exploit this. I firmly believe that Media Studies should be a compulsory subject to show people how to question more.

I realise that studying any subject that involves statistics and looking at various sources (which includes psychology, history, sociology and more) will encourage enquiry, but they all tend to be optional above a basic level. Arguably, a proper grounding in media is even more important now, as social media and other Internet sources make it even more difficult to look behind the headlines.

*I do not have a MS degree, and it was not taught when I was at school (or not in my school, anyway), so I have no axe to grind in this regard.

My issue with Age UK’s claims, as reported by the press, are that they would have the public believe that the majority of pensioners are shivering because they cannot afford to heat their homes and that is obviously not true.

Campaign on behalf of those have been worst affected by the withdrawal of universal WFP but doing it using flawed research and numbers that don’t hold up to scrutiny exposes the organisation to criticism, allegations of misinformation and further generational divide. Younger people paying exhorbitant rents already wonder why such a fuss has been made about the loss of £200 or £300.

This research was carried about by Opinium for Age UK. A sample of only 2,573 UK adults aged 66+ were interviewed 6th–16th January 2025. The data is said to be nationally representative on age, gender and region. Figures have been scaled up to the UK age 66+ population using Office for National Statistics mid-year population estimates for 2023 to give estimates of the number of pensioners affected nationally.

I believe that was 12.6 million. As of May 2024 it was 12.9 million.

So Opinium sampled not 2% of the pensioner population of 12.6 million, not 0.2% of the pensioner population of 12.6 million but just 0.02% of the pensioner population of 12.6 million and claim that over 9 million are suffering.

As 2.7 million are either already paying or are on the cusp of paying 40% tax that’s akin to saying that almost everyone who doesn't pay 40% tax is struggling. It’s emotive nonsense.

Norah

NonGrannyMoll

The Express, like every other newspaper, is primarily in the business of making money. We should bear that in mind when our eye is caught by an inflammatory headline. Did the reporter ask every pensioner? Of course not - I wasn't asked, for one. Or did (s)he ask 4 pensioners and 3 said their homes were cold? Were there reliable statistics to support the claim? (Mark Twain: "There are lies, damned lies and statistics.")

Agreed.

However, even one cold pensioner is too many.

That is very true.

But what NGM says is also true. We need to know the source of the statistics, as ever. What was the question? I suggested upthread that if people were asked if they'd been cold in January, everyone who'd left the house would say yes. We don't know how many were asked, and how thy were sampled, so we don't know if the figures are representative. It's like eight out of ten cats, or the small print on face cream ads that say 70% of 30 people surveyed like it. That just means that they found 21 people who liked the cream.

This is why people are saying that we don't know anyone 'left shivering in their homes'. It's not that we are too dim to realise that our friends are not representative - it's that we are pointing out that the Express' claim that 75% of pensioners are 'living in a cold home' (what does that mean, incidentally?) can't be representative either.

NonGrannyMoll

The Express, like every other newspaper, is primarily in the business of making money. We should bear that in mind when our eye is caught by an inflammatory headline. Did the reporter ask every pensioner? Of course not - I wasn't asked, for one. Or did (s)he ask 4 pensioners and 3 said their homes were cold? Were there reliable statistics to support the claim? (Mark Twain: "There are lies, damned lies and statistics.")

Agreed.

However, even one cold pensioner is too many.

PoliticsNerd

Nanna8 the idea, that no one at anytime or for any reason should be cold, is ridiculous.

Nobody is sweeping anything under the carpet. Many try to give help where they can.

Your words. What I actually said was ‘ no one should be freezing cold because they can’t afford heating’ Please do not misquote.

These comments of “I don’t know anyone who lives in a cold house “ are meaningless aren’t they?

I also don’t personally know anyone who is too scared to put their heating on but I know these people exist!

In any case a few folk on here have said they are in that situation.

Yes I can understand why the figures quoted are disputed and the headline certainly was misleading, but for a variety of reasons, many people are living miserable lives in cold damp homes.

No one should be freezing, no one should be hungry, however there are definitely people who are.

Single people of all ages living alone are in the worst situation.

I still dispute these figures.

I think far more people are warm and not hungry, even pensioners, I know one single lady living alone in a three bedroom house she rents, she refuses to downsize and cannot afford to heat her whole home.

We are lucky, despite living in an older house, we are always warm.

PoliticsNerd

ViceVersa

Whitewavemark2 Several of us on this thread have already explained that yes, we do live in cold homes!

Why?

What makes your home particularly cold?
Is it rented or owned?
Why can't you move to a warmer home? (I'm not saying you can)
If you haven't enough money to spend on heating, whst are you spending it on?
Have you checked for benefits that cover what seems to be that greater need?

Nothing is simple but on such a large scale thing hafe to be simplified. So many questions to be answered about any individual being cold at home and they are not all in the government's gift to sort out. Some are of the person's own choosing or imposed on them by circumstance.

I've already explained this several times over on GN. We live in an old house, which we own. We have done as much as we possibly can regarding insulation etc to make it as warm as possible. We can't move for various reasons which are too complicated to explain on here, and we don't qualify for benefits of any kind whatsoever. These are our circumstances and there is little we can do to change them.
Thankfully we do have a wood burner and access to free wood, which makes a big difference. I'm not expecting to wave a magic wand and I don't expect anyone to feel sorry to me. But some people can be extremely judgemental on here and think everyone has it as easy as they do.

I am managing by using my smaller bedroom as a sitting room. I have my pets and television in there and during this cold weather, it's where I'm spending most of my time. The only time I feel truly warm is in bed, so I retire early.
I'm not complaining because I'm thankful to have a roof over my head, but it does make life difficult.