The general election will take place on the 4th July. Now is the time to take action to ensure election candidates are keeping high quality, insulated housing and proportionate responses to the climate crisis at the top of their agenda.
At Medact, we intend to ensure the crisis of cold & damp homes is high on the political agenda during this election campaign and beyond. Health workers across the country are calling on our parliamentary candidates to tell us how they will take action on these issues.
You can take action to help in your constituency! Write, tweet or speak directly to your parliamentary candidates to tell them that the health of our homes is a key concern for you and your patients.
What we know:
- Sharing your experiences as a frontline worker can be a powerful way to convey the urgency of the issues that you care about
- Health workers are among the most trusted professionals in society
- The NHS and the Cost of Living Crisis are top issues for voters in this election.
There is an opportunity to use our voices to call on our candidates to protect our NHS and our climate by taking action to make our homes sites of health not of illness. It will only take a couple of minutes to email all of your candidates!
You can find out who your election candidates are, and how to contact them, by entering your postcode at this website: https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/
We’ve drafted a template email which you can view at the bottom of this page, or download as a word document.
Let us know you took action!
We will be releasing a toolkit to support health workers to lobby new parliamentarians. If you would like to follow up this action by meeting with your new MP, get in touch to learn about how to make the meeting as effective as possible! Contact [email protected].
Join our online gatherings for healthy homes in July!
We are organising two brilliant online gathering to grow our movement! Please share these on Twitter and Instagram to spread the word.
Template letter to parliamentary candidates
{YOUR FULL ADDRESS}
{YOUR POSTCODE}
{DATE}
Dear {MP NAME},
My name is {YOUR NAME} and I live in your constituency [FIND OUT WHAT YOUR CONSTITUENCY IS HERE].
I am writing to find out what you would do to tackle the crisis of fuel poverty, and cold and damp homes, if elected.
The health and social care community has been witnessing a growing crisis of fuel poverty and people living in cold, damp and mouldy homes. New figures from the Warm this Winter campaign reveal that 16% of UK adults (8.3m people) live in cold, damp homes, exposed to the health complications that come from living in fuel poverty. We need urgent action to ensure that policies are taken to heat our homes, not our planet.
The health impacts of the crisis are huge, impacting cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, child development and mental health – and sadly, cold homes have been leading to deaths. Greenpeace has recently calculated that on average, 58 people have died per day every winter because of cold homes since government cuts to insulation funding.
Homes should be a place of comfort, health and security. Instead, across the UK, homes have become sites of illness. They are rendered cold and damp by poor insulation and sky-high energy prices.
[Add compelling constituency data on numbers in fuel poverty, can be found using this tool]
[Share a story from your own experience – it can be really powerful to say “In my own workplace I’ve witnessed…” This messaging guide might help!]
Illnesses linked to cold, damp and dangerous homes cost the NHS more than £2.5 billion a year. In the 21st century, health workers should not be treating people for conditions related to cold homes. This is a preventable public health crisis that cannot be solved by health workers. It requires political action and choices that will ultimately not only solve the crisis of fuel poverty, but also help to tackle the climate crisis and create jobs, critical to the health of us all.
Ahead of the next general election, I am campaigning with the health charity Medact to ask all political parties to commit to tackling the crisis of cold and damp homes. I believe this can be achieved by:
- A reformed energy system to ensure that everyone has access to the energy they need
- A mass retrofitting programme that is properly funded
- A rapid just transition away from dirty and expensive fossil fuels towards cheaper, clean renewables
We are part of the Warm this Winter campaign, and the End Fuel Poverty Coalition – a broad coalition of anti-poverty, health, housing and environmental campaigners, charities, local authorities, trade unions and consumer organisations.
You can take action today by pledging your support to end fuel poverty. Show your support by filling End Fuel Poverty Coalition’s candidate pledge here.
I would be happy to meet with you and discuss this further.
Please do all you can to support this.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours faithfully,
{YOUR NAME}
