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From Fuel Poverty to the Just Transition: How Health Workers Can Join the Fight to Win
Wednesday 3rd July, 2024 @ 6:30 pm – 7:45 pm
Our homes are making us sick, shortening lives and stealing children’s futures. Join us this July for two online gatherings, where we will learn about how and why our homes have become sites of illness, and the political solutions towards reclaiming the relationship between homes and health.
Millions of people in the UK live in homes that are cold, damp, and mouldy. We can’t afford our energy bills, our houses are poorly insulated, and our government continues to rely on dirty, expensive fossil fuels. While people get sick, energy and fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits.
Cold and damp homes cost thousands of lives every year. This is the direct result of political choices—putting profit for shareholders and landlords above everyone’s right to live in a safe, warm home.
We know the solutions. As our Public Health Case for a Green New Deal stated loud and clear: we need quality homes for all, fair access to energy, and a rapid just transition to cheap, renewable energy.
At this online gathering, we’ll hear from speakers on how fossil fuels are powering the crisis of cold and damp homes, how mass insulation of homes and reform of our energy system is central to a just transition, and how organising in solidarity with tenants and communities builds power to force change.
We’ll share the tools that you need to learn, pressure decision makers, and build the health voice alongside communities—fighting to win healthy homes for all.
Speakers at the event will include:
- Simon from the End Fuel Poverty Coalition & Warm This Winter campaign—EFPC is a broad group of anti-poverty, environmental, health and housing charities, trade unions and campaigners
- Stuart Bretherton from Fuel Poverty Action—which campaigns to protect people from fuel poverty. We challenge rip-off energy companies and unfair policies that leave people to endure cold homes. We take action for warm, well-insulated homes and clean and affordable energy, under the control of people and communities, not private companies
- Representative from Living Rent—based in Scotland, Living Rent is a mass-membership organisation of low-middle income renters, working and fighting together to win concrete improvements to our daily lives and put political and economic power back where it belongs
- Scott McAulay from Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) and Anthropocene Architecture School
- Dr Isobel Braithwaite, Medact member Public Health Doctor—currently doing research on Housing and Health, Isobel has worked as a medical doctor and on public health issues including climate change and extreme weather, air pollution and mental health
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. They are insecure due to unaffordable rents, evictions, and poor-quality housing.
Cold, unaffordable and insecure homes are no accident. They are the symptoms of a political system that produces mass illness and deepens inequalities in both health and wealth. The root causes are political—and this means the solutions are too.
At these online gatherings, together we will gain the tools we need to take action as health workers. Join the fight to win healthy homes for all, as part of the wider struggles for climate, housing and economic justice.
In the run up to the general election & beyond we intend to get organised, fight for healthy homes, and win.