AQW 2883/16-21

Ms Kellie Armstrong
Alliance Party
Strangford

Tabled Date: 13/09/2016
Answered On Date: 21/09/2016
Priority Written: No

Question:
To ask the Minister for Communities (i) to outline the criteria used to decide areas of priority for the Affordable Warmth Scheme; and (ii) whether he will review these criteria.

Answer:

The Affordable Warmth Scheme is an area based targeted scheme aimed at owner occupiers and those who rent from a private sector landlord. In order to qualify for the scheme the household must have a total gross annual income of less than £20,000.

A tailor-made targeting tool was developed and tested for identifying households in severe fuel poverty. It aimed to find small areas of Northern Ireland (around 150 households in size) where most households are likely to be in fuel poverty, and a sizeable proportion of these are likely to be in extreme fuel poverty. It uses more than a dozen databases to calculate likelihoods in these small areas, and these include:

housing quality data;

estimates of income and benefit dependency;

prevailing oil and gas prices;

prevailing temperatures;

demographic vulnerability profiles.

Subsequent validation of the accuracy of this targeting tool was based on detailed survey data from more than 2,100 homes across all of Northern Ireland. The validation assessment indicated that:

the tool was able to identify small areas in which 89% of all households were in fuel poverty;

38% were in extreme fuel poverty.

The data indicates that the accuracy of targeting resources towards those most in need has been considerably enhanced by the application of this approach to targeting those in fuel poverty by my Department.

Following successful pilot testing in 2012 and 2013 the targeting tool was used to identify addresses in each council area most likely to be at risk of fuel poverty and ranked these in order of severity. These ranked lists were provided to councils and they have been engaged in a programme of visiting and surveying the households to assess eligibility and work with colleagues in the Housing Executive to improve the energy efficiency of the homes.

The targeting tool proved to be very effective in identifying households most at risk of fuel poverty during the pilot phases of Affordable Warmth and evidence from the first full year of operation of the scheme confirms that the targeting tool is effective in identifying homes in real need of help.

The Affordable Warmth Scheme completed its first full year of operation in March 2016 and is currently being reviewed. This review will include an examination of the accuracy of the targeting tool used to select the target areas.