With energy bills continuing to skyrocket amid a cold start to the year, many families are finding it difficult to keep their homes warm.
When one plumber - now appropriately named Britain’s kindest - visited the home of a family struggling to pay for food and gas, he decided to pay it forward by footing their bills.
James Anderson, 52, was called out to the home of a family-of-five last Saturday (January 15) who had been struggling to keep their heating on before they reached their next payday.
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James, from Burnley, has run his own plumbing business Depher, which stands for Disability and Elderly Plumbing and Heating Emergency Repair, since 2017.
“They rang me to see whether there was anything we could do to help them get through until the next time they got paid,” James explained.
“I said I’d pop in and see what I could do. But when I got there, I realised the actual poverty that they’re living in and the impact all this is having on people."
James said he was shocked to be able to see his own breath, while he felt two of the children were “going to die” from the cold while their sobbing mum and dad looked on helplessly.
He said he immediately decided to provide the family with £170 worth of food, gas and electricity to help them get by without going hungry.
He said: "You walk in and you’re talking to them, and you can see your breath while you’re talking to them. They’ve got children there. They’re confused because they don’t know what’s going on.
“The children are like: “Why is this happening? Why am I cold? Why can’t my mum and dad keep me warm? Why can’t they put the boiler on? Why can’t they give me a meal."
As part of Depher, James has supported thousands of families in need since 2017.
Worringly, he said this wasn’t the first time that he’d been in a home where he could see his own breath as families saved money by switching off their heating.
He said: “Over the last few weeks, I’ve been to a few houses, not just families but elderly and disabled people as well, and you can see a plume of air coming out of their mouth.
“It’s that cold you can see your words before you can bloody well hear them, and that should not be acceptable in this day and age.”
James said that as energy bills continue to skyrocket, he expects similar scenes will soon be replicated around the country.
He has called on the government to act now in order to stop them.
He said: “Where do we draw the line as a society and say, “Now we need to act?”
“There’s a lot of stuff the government can do to cut the cost of living by capping these companies that are charging stupid, extortionate, out of reality rates.
“The poorest and the lowest in the country are always going to be penalised and expected to pay the most in the country out of everybody else.
“It’s wrong, and it’s time for a change.”
An energy price cap is set to come into force in April and Energy UK has already warned the cap rise could rise by £500 or more.
James said he also feared how many poverty-stricken parents could turn to crime in order to pay for their family’s needs if they couldn’t make ends meet in the future.
He said: “There are two options – either go to a loan shark and then they get themselves in debt, and that will drive up the crime rate on that side.
“Or even worse, there’s going to be more crime with vans, schools, shops getting robbed.
“People are going to go out and take stuff that doesn’t belong to them to feed their child – that’s the next stage we’re going to see.”
James said the government should already be aware of families growing financial problems, which he believed may out-live the pandemic.
“The government should know this,” he added.
“The prime minister should know this.
“It’s going to create an unstable problem lasting more than two to three years.”
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