Eligibility criteria for the UK Winter Fuel Payment: are we targeting the right people?
Kai Wan, Jonathon Taylor, Marcos Quijal-Zamorano, Joan Ballester, Shakoor Hajat · 2026
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Description
Kai Wan, Jonathon Taylor, Marcos Quijal-Zamorano, Joan Ballester, and Shakoor Hajat published a study in 2026 asking whether Britain's Winter Fuel Payment reaches the older people most at risk from cold. The payment helps pensioners heat their homes, but eligibility recently tightened around income. The authors tested whether income is really the best targeting signal.
They modeled cold-related deaths among people seventy-five and older across 324 English districts from 2007 to 2019. Areas in the worst quarter for fuel poverty, a measure mixing low income with leaky housing, showed clearly higher cold death risk than the best quarter. That signal beat plain income and general deprivation measures, and about seventeen percent of cold deaths were attributed to fuel poverty itself. Target on fuel poverty, they conclude.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kai Wan, Jonathon Taylor, Marcos Quijal-Zamorano, Joan Ballester, Shakoor Hajat |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 15 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |