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The majority of the remaining households are elderly people who own their homes outright. Some of the latter households do have small amounts of capital—usually less than £600—which they reserve as a funeral fund. Thus at least 8 million households are in need of outside assistance to implement energy efficiency improvements. 4 Affordable warmth The title of the Working Group contains two terms—‘affordable’ and ‘warmth’— which need to be defined before possible solutions can be discussed. 1 WARMTH ‘Warmth’ is a difficult concept to define.

5 °C at all other times. Such a temperature regime is likely to result in a temperature, averaged over space and time, of about 17 °C. Evidence of lower temperatures therefore indicates cold homes, for the purposes of this study. There are millions of homes in Britain where this minimum temperature is not achieved. 2 indicates, 20% of homes in England have a temperature below 12 °C when it begins to freeze outside and only 50% have a mean internal temperature over 16 °C. The number of cold homes increases as the weather gets colder, indicating that many households have limited amounts of money for heating and are unable to increase their expenditure to compensate for a drop in external temperatures.

Unfortunately, there are few surveys of actual measured temperatures inside the home and those that exist are difficult to compare. Therefore, only the most generalized temperature trends can be identified (evidence of cold homes is given below). Over the period 1970–86, total energy demand in the domestic sector had been relatively constant, when external weather variations were taken into account. Since then, demand has been increasing and the continuing decline in household size will place continuing pressure on growth in demand in the next few years.