“Never in my career did I expect to be creating warm banks,” said Ian Brookfield, the Labour leader of Wolverhampton council. “I’m embarrassed that in this country we’re having to do this.”
Just 15 miles from where the Conservative party has gathered for its annual conference, people in Wolverhampton are facing the highest rates of fuel poverty of any local authority in England. Compared with a national average of 13%, Wolverhampton has a fuel poverty rate of 22.4%.
To prepare for winter, the council has created 38 “warm spaces” in council buildings and community centres across the city. From 24 October they will be open to the public for people to warm up, charge their phone and have a hot drink.
“I’m not going to be happy that we’re opening these,” said Brookfield. “But we’re doing it because there is a very realistic chance we will lose people, not from accidents or illness but because they can’t afford to heat or eat.”
Brookfield said that seeing images from the Tory conference, so close to where people are struggling to heat their homes, was particularly infuriating.
“The very first comments we heard from conference was ‘Birmingham is a dump’,” he said. “You look at that, and what they’re trying to do to benefits, and of course everyone is welcome to come to the West Midlands, but it does stick in the back of the throat when you see the lack of compassion.”
While Liz Truss was busy in Birmingham trying to unite the party behind her economic policies, there was fear and anger on the streets of Wolverhampton over rising living costs.
Beverley Buckley, 53, said she was already wrapping up in blankets to keep heating costs low, as her energy bills are set to double from October.
“I’ve had to leave work recently because of ill health, so my worry is how the hell am I going to pay my bills? It is a big worry,” she said. “I’ve stopped putting the central heating on and stopped using my [clothes] dryer, because that uses a lot of electricity.
“I was told if I use less energy then I hopefully shouldn’t pay double, but I wasn’t using much in the first place, how much less can I use?”
Like many people in the West Midlands city, she said she had “no faith” that the Conservative government would do anything to help ease the burden.
Bernard Gamage, a 70-year-old retired jockey, said: “They’ve had 13 years to get the country sorted. We’ve had correspondence from E.ON that our bills are going up in October again. But I am not intending to pay the extra. People are going to refuse.”
He said: “We do still have the political power to say ‘we didn’t elect her, you did’. It’s not an elected government. They’re telling us to work longer, eat less, drink less, or put extra clothing on. Why should we when they’ve created this situation?”
Jenna Raybone, 36, a medical secretary at a GP surgery and mother of five, said her family had agreed to no screen time on Tuesdays and Thursdays to keep electricity bills down.
“We’ve also said we’ll stick to the gas hob rather than electric oven and grill,” she said. “We keep the heating on the eco setting at all times, and we’ve said only if everyone has got jumpers and layers on and are still cold, then we’ll turn it up. It’s a worry, there’s no extra money coming in but everything is going up.”
She is seeing the impact of the cost of living crisis at work too, where more patients are asking for paracetamol on prescription as they cannot afford to buy it. “It genuinely feels like the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting left behind,” she said.
