44,000 winter deaths a national scandal - Dan Jarvis MP

Aden Simpson | PoliticsHome

Labour MP Dan Jarvis is leading a debate in the Commons this evening to address the tens of thousands of UK citizens dying from cold weather each year.



The UK is far from the coldest country in Europe, yet more people are dying from the cold here than in any other.

According the Office of National Statistics, a staggering 43,900 people died from exposure to the cold in the winter of 2014/2015, all of which could have been prevented by effective public policy.

“It’s a national scandal,” says Dan Jarvis, Labour MP for Barnsley Central.

“Most people don’t realise the numbers involved. I first raised this with the Prime Minister four years ago, and since then we’ve worked out that 117,000 people have died, completely unnecessarily.”

The nature of the ONS figures, for what it calls ‘excessive winter deaths’ relating to respiratory and flu-like diseases and hyperthermia, are such that every case could have been avoided.

“They essentially die in a way they wouldn’t have done through the summer months,” Jarvis added, “from the kind of thing you wouldn’t expect people to be getting in 2016.”

That these deaths could be prevented is borne out by comparisons with other European countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland all have considerably fewer winter deaths, yet much colder winters. This is also true of less prosperous and more northerly countries such as Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

“Why is that?” Jarvis asks. “It’s because these countries are better prepared for dealing with the cold: their homes tend to be better insulated, and they tend to have more robust winter plans.”

Jarvis is leading a debate in the House of Commons tonight calling on the Government for a coordinated national strategy to reduce the appalling number of avoidable deaths.

The health component is clearly important, and Jarvis will be expressing specific concern over the Government’s ‘flu plan’ for the coming winter, which is already two months behind last year.

“But this needs to sit alongside other aspects,” he adds. “Home insulation and fuel poverty, that are not the responsibility of the Department of Health, and the means by which they can be drawn together.”

Undeniably, a leading contributor to excess winter deaths is the price of energy.

The years where the number of excess winter deaths were highest, do not correlate with the coldest temperatures: 2014/15 which saw the highest number of deaths in a decade was the median winter temperature over the same period.

Far more correlative is the price of energy. According to a March Briefing Paper from the House of Commons Library, the three years where excess deaths peaked in the last decade - 2008/9; 2012/13 and 2014/15 - were also the three years where the consumer prices of energy were the highest on record.

“That should focus our minds even more,” said Jarvis. “Regulating the energy market is clearly an important part of this: it does require regulation and it does require the Government to intervene.”

“They’ve been dragging their feet, but now is the moment for the Government to step in and make sure the energy companies do the right thing by these more vulnerable groups.”

There have been steps in the right direction, he explained, such as the Green Deal which lent money to companies that provide homes with insulation, but this has now expired. Similarly the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), an efficiency scheme aimed at tackling fuel poverty, is set to expire next year.

A spokesperson from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said:

“We know there is still more to do, which is why we are requiring energy companies to help us make one million homes warmer by 2020.”

The department informed us that a new supplier obligation, to replace the ECO, will run for five years from April 2017 to March 2022.

“It will reduce the impact of the obligation by around £30 for the average household from 2017/18 compared to current projections and upgrade the energy efficiency of well over 200,000 homes per year, tackling the root cause of fuel poverty.”

Jarvis will also be calling for public health directors in local authorities to accept responsibility for coordinating efforts with GPs, hospitals, clinical commissioning groups and the charitable sector, to be more aware of who the vulnerable groups are, and better prepared to help them through the winter.

“The essence of this is having an overarching cross-government strategy which has a clear plan for reducing the number of excess winter deaths, and which assesses that plan, which convenes across departmental working groups to coordinate the different policy efforts that are taking place.”

“I’m not talking about investing billions of pounds; I’m talking about working more effectively across government, so that we’re much better placed to tackle what is a national scandal.

“People will look at this and think this should not be happening in 2016. In a relatively prosperous country it’s completely unacceptable that so many people are dying unnecessarily.”