Exploring the role of welfare chauvinism and housing as drivers of energy poverty among UK refugee communities

The energy crisis which has unfolded in the UK in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen spiralling costs of gas and electricity. Energy poverty, a situation whereby a household is unable to obtain socially and materially necessitated levels of energy services , has seen a corresponding increase, as many as 8.4m households in the UK are suffering from the condition. Classically attributed to low-incomes, high energy costs and poor energy efficiency, academics have argued for a need to investigate the institutional and structural mechanisms through which vulnerability to energy poverty is generated and reproduced . For example, ethnic minorities are more likely to suffer from energy poverty than white communities, with a dearth of research into the reasons why this trend occurs. Even less is known about the prevalence and drivers of energy poverty amongst refugees in the UK, with no known academic literature produced to date on this topic. It is, however, well documented that refugees are more likely than average to occupy poor-quality, insecure, overcrowded housing, living in conditions of poverty and exclusion, often in the private rented sector. These are factors that are critical to increasing vulnerability to energy poverty. Aggressive neoliberalism since the 1980s, the retrenchment of the welfare state, and successive anti-refugee policies since the early 1990s have made it increasingly difficult for refugees to access social housing and welfare support, deliberately producing destitution in the name of creating a ‘hostile environment’. Therefore, in the face of a worsening cost of living crisis, impacting disproportionately upon the most marginalised and most vulnerable in society, in tandem with the highest number of asylum applications being made in the UK for two decades , I argue that this is a vitally important research gap to fill. In this paper, I develop the concept of deservingness, in relation to its weaponisation in socio-political debates around the provision of housing services, to shed light upon the intersection of housing access and energy poverty experienced by refugees. I theorise that deservingness discourse around housing access and who has the right to a home, provides a key mechanism of producing and reproducing systemic social inequalities, which is in turn critical in generating the precarity and deprivation experienced by refugee communities. In the absence of data on this issue, looking at housing provision, utilising findings from the H2020 project, ENPOR, provides a starting point for understanding the drivers and experiences of energy poverty within these communities, group, and thus a platform for the creation of more just and inclusive policy.