A society that lets thousands of its citizens die from needless, preventable causes is broken. Every day we wake up to increasingly alarming headlines about coronavirus, but where is the panic about the tens of thousands who are already dying unnecessarily? Britain’s rate of excess winter deaths is twice that of Finland, yet London’s average temperature in January is 10C higher than that of Helsinki.

“Excess winter deaths” is a clinical phrase lacking in humanity: it refers to the increased numbers of people sent to their graves in colder months. Such is our damning reality that, when adjusted for seasonal temperature differences, Britain has the worst record in Europe apart from Ireland.

On average, there are 32,000 more deaths between December and March than the rest of the year. Many have perished because of the refusal of a society with abundant wealth and resources to provide for its most vulnerable citizens. An average of 9,700 deaths each year are believed to be caused by living in a cold house, according to research by National Energy Action (NEA) and the environmental group E3G. According to its figures, that is as many as those whose lives are cut short by breast or prostate cancer. While, sadly, we do not have the ability to cure all forms of cancer, we do have the means to ensure all have a warm home. Indeed, 6,900 of those deaths were linked to the 25% coldest homes in the country.

Let us be frank. If thousands of people were dying needlessly each year in affluent neighbourhoods and suburbs, wouldn’t this be treated as a national emergency, and wouldn’t action have been taken sooner?

Poverty kills: this isn’t hyperbole, but fact. Some 10% of the total deaths, significantly more than 3,000, are directly linked to fuel poverty itself. These are older people – perhaps those who survived war, and who helped build the country – dying of cold because they don’t have the money to pay their energy bills.

Despite the rightful protection of the triple lock on pensions, we still live in a society in which 1.9 million pensioners languish below the poverty line, a statistic that compares harshly with other wealthy, developed nations. How did we end up with such a shameful record?

“Britain has the worst housing stock in western Europe in terms of retaining heat and energy efficiency,” E3G’s Pedro Guertler tells me. That has led Britain to be described as the “cold man of Europe”. Here is another dimension of a housing crisis that has deprived millions of people of secure, affordable places to live: one that actually endangers lives. Older people with pre-existing conditions – such as respiratory illnesses or cardiovascular problems – are those most at risk.

It is a needless drain on resources and money, too. Solving the crisis would save England’s NHS an estimated £1.36bn. It would also mean fewer patients taking up beds or adding to waiting times in GPs’ surgeries and A&E departments. But such has been the false economy of austerity.

A public health approach to cold homes makes sense: as NEA’s Peter Smith tells me: “Local authorities have increasingly accepted the link between poor housing and health. If you’ve got a broken boiler and poor insulation, you’ll only wind up in hospital, so it’s better to fix heating or insulation so you can stay in homes longer.”

Unfortunately, it’s predicted that by this year local authorities will have lost about 60% of their budgets, leaving vital services such as public health squeezed and cut, particularly in poorer areas. According to the Institute for Public and Policy Research, “almost £1 in every £7 cut from public health services has come from England’s 10 most deprived communities – compared to just £1 in every £46 in the country’s 10 least deprived areas”.

The danger is that we end up with what Smith describes as a “carousel of people with poor health” (typically respiratory or circulatory illnesses) becoming sick and being sent to hospital and then removed quickly because of bed blocking; they are then sent back to the very cold conditions that made them ill in the first place. An urgent priority should be to reverse life-destroying cuts to public health.

Research by Michael Marmot, director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, has uncovered other public health consequences, such as mental ill-health and isolation, because pensioners feel unable to invite friends into their cold homes.

For years, this crisis has been widely ignored and neglected. When George Osborne was chancellor, he slashed the UK’s key energy efficiency programme, which was specifically aimed at the poorest homeowners. Given the thousands who die from fuel poverty, this alone should be a scandal that follows Osborne to his grave. But there has, finally, been some movement: the Tory manifesto committed to £6.3bn over half a decade on energy efficiency measures to reduce fuel bills in 2.2m homes. Pressure should be exerted on Boris Johnson’s administration to abide by these commitments. The coming budget will be a key test.

There’s another priority too: this week, NEA and the Fair by Design movement – which focuses on tackling the “extra costs of being poor” – launched a campaign to defend and extend the warm home discount scheme. The programme provides up to £140 towards energy bills for pensioners, but is at risk of ending in a year’s time. It should be extended to poor working-age families too. As things stand, they have to know if they are eligible, and apply to their supplier each year. And there are limited spaces, meaning up to 2m households could be missing out.

There is, of course, room to be more ambitious still. A mass insulation programme for all homes and businesses would create skilled jobs, stimulate the economy, bring down fuel bills, save lives and reduce carbon emissions. Although the government has introduced a partial energy bill cap, prices rose again last year, so there should be urgent action to make them affordable.

As the Marmot review on health inequality in England in the last decade uncovered this week, life expectancy has stalled for the first time in over a century; for the most deprived women, it has gone backwards. Both austerity and a social order that prioritises money over human lives is to blame. The needless deaths of tens of thousands of people is just one part of the story. We cannot, sadly, go back in time and save them . But we can, and must, demand that the government prevents any more people unnecessarily dying this way.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist