Medact’s Organisational Strategy 2025–2030: Priority Area
Problem:
The housing system has turned homes from sources of good health and stability into sites of sickness affecting our minds, bodies and communities. At the same time our reliance on fossil fuels has led to spiralling heating costs and a fuel poverty crisis, leaving millions of people unsafe at home. This system entrenches the injustices of health inequity and intergenerational poverty, disproportionately exposing those with the least social, economic and political power to worse health as a result of insecure tenancies, unaffordable rents, and cold and poor-quality homes. Medact is committed to working for climate and economic justice. Our work on a healthy housing and energy system allows us to connect fuel poverty and unaffordable rents to the ways in which the climate and economic crises directly impact our day-to-day lives. We believe this is a key opportunity for the health community to take strategic and tangible action on both climate change and economic injustice.
Health worker role:
Health workers frequently see patients impacted by conditions directly related to their housing, from respiratory problems to worsening mental health, as the NHS is increasingly treating these harms caused by landlords and fossil-fuel companies. Health workers can connect the housing and energy systems to poor health outcomes, demonstrating the responsibility the health community has to stand alongside residents working to improve their living conditions, and the housing and energy systems that underpin them.
Over the next 5 years Medact will:
- Organise with residents in communities across the UK to make visible the health impacts of the housing and energy systems, and build community power to win improved conditions
- Work with the health community to shape national policy in support of energy justice, increased social housing provision, affordable rents and energy bills, increased protections for renters, and mass insulation programmes
- Forefront a public health analysis of housing and energy systems to support our policy demands and bolster the work of national coalitions
Medact’s impact:
- Improvements in residents’ health and wellbeing as local organising wins improve housing conditions now and increase community control of the housing system
- Health community support helps secure national policy change in line with our demands
- Increased public understanding of how the extractive fossil-fuel industry and for-profit housing system directly cause fuel poverty and drive health inequity – increasing support for systems change
Climate Justice:
This is our primary Climate Justice programme. Health workers are critical in linking the public health crisis of cold, damp and mouldy homes with the urgency of ending fossil-fuel reliance. They remain one of the most trusted voices in the UK, and bear witness to the physical and mental health impacts on communities of unaffordable energy and poor-quality housing stock – both crises which are inextricably connected with continued fossil-fuel extraction.
