heating or eating

Cost of living crisis: ‘People heating one room with firewood’

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A classic rural example of the problems people are facing in terms of the cost of living crisis. This story tells us:

High Ash Farm in Caistor St Edmund is a 500-acre arable farm. It is also a haven for wildlife, with half the farm set aside for flora and fauna. The farm has also diversified into horses, with 25 stables and paddocks for livery.

Daniel Skinner, the owner, says the rise in the cost of fuel is a major worry along with the tripling of fertiliser prices.

“The difficulty is cashflow. You need to be spending your money now on your fertiliser, but you’re not going to realise that return for quite some time,” he says.

“The other problem is increase in risk. If you get a really dry May, then your crop of barley on a south-facing slope could be completely droughted out.

“I suppose in a normal year that would be really bad, but in a year like this when your input costs have gone up so much, if something like that happens it would be a complete disaster – you could potentially lose everything.”

He says some of his employees and many older people living in villages, are also having to make difficult decisions, especially when it comes to heating their homes.

“You’re rarely on mains gas or anything like that. You’re often heating you house with oil which isn’t subject to the energy price cap,” he says.

“We do [sell] quite a bit of firewood on this farm but in the last two or three months, there’s been a lot of people really quite worried about heating their houses next winter.

“So they’ve been buying in a lot of firewood, with the intention of single-room heating of their house with firewood, rather than turning the central heating on.

“And they’ve been wanting to buy it now while the prices are much more moderate.”

‘I come to the library to keep warm’: Norfolk residents battling fuel poverty

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God bless local authorities and their humble libraries. I was in Mablethorpe last week and the library assistant offered me a cup of tea in return for a voluntary donation, plus biscuits and I was just waiting for some people to join me for a site visit!!! This is both a sad but a heart warming story. It tells us:

Every weekday Andrew Murkin comes to Downham Market library for books, wifi and – most importantly – warmth.

Murkin, who is 63 and receives disability benefits, lives in a bungalow in the Norfolk town and as his energy bills rose this winter he decided to heat only one room for two hours a day.

“In the winter I come to the library to keep warm,” he said. “I like to get up early. But sitting at home is miserable in the cold.”

At weekends, when his local library is mostly closed, he has few options. “In winter I just sit at home with my coat on and a duvet on,” he said. “I’ve been wearing two T-shirts, two jumpers and a coat inside. A lot of my friends do the same.”

The plight of Elsie, a 77-year-old who ate one meal a day and travelled on buses to stay warm, became emblematic of the cost of living crisis after Boris Johnson was confronted with her story in a Good Morning Britain interview. Her case has highlighted the challenges faced by older people unable to meet the cost of rising bills.

In Downham Market, near King’s Lynn, the library is a lifeline for older and vulnerable people looking for somewhere warm to pass time without spending money.

The south of the town has the ward with the highest proportion of pensioners in England and Wales, with 57% over-65. Many of them rely on the library.