While the situation has improved since that time, many people continue to face hard choices between keeping warm or sacrificing spending on other pressing priorities.
Fuel poverty is an insidious problem.
It wears people down, increasing their chances of ill health as well as making it harder to recover, and contributes to the excess winter death toll among pensioners. It holds back children's education. It means people fail to get the most out of their community or their community from them. It adds to the pressures on health and social care services. This is unacceptable and we commit ourselves by 2010 to end the blight of fuel poverty for vulnerable households.