Disabled man considers cooking a ‘luxury’ due to energy bills

15 comments

1. We need a full inquiry into the treatment of disabled people in the UK since like 2006ish or so. We need to know the scale of the suffering.

   Of course no party would ever do that

2. But why is he spending £120 on groceries a week?! Seems a bit excessive for somebody struggling with money…

3. Fuck this country and fuck the Tories! This is a goddamn disgrace

4. An electric wheelchair definitely doesn’t cost 4-5 quid a night to charge….

   Your average electric wheel chair has 0.3-0.4 kWh battery (these use pretty standardized 24V 10-12 AH or 12V 30-35 AH batteries), which at the current cap would cost about 7-8p for a full charge, even if the charger is for some reason highly inefficient say only 50% efficiency you are looking at 14-16p per full charge.

   5 quid gives you about 20 kw/h that’s enough to give you 80-90 miles range on an EV…..

   So either they said 4-5p per night and the BBC fucked this up or there is something going on…

   An electric wheelchair usually does 6-8 miles on a full charge so if they mainly use it within and around their home that’s about 2 charges a week.

5. I’ve worked in the NHS and spent 5 years working for an Osteoarthritis service. This is first person I’ve ever know to be using a wheelchair for the condition. II imagine it’s for worse because they won’t do the surgery unless he loses weight, that’s probably also why he has sleep apnoea

6. > His wheelchair alone costs between £4 and £5 a night to charge

   How? At a 25p/kWh that is between 16 to 20kWh being put into his wheelchair – that’s the sort of usage you would be putting into an EV not a wheelchair.

7. i think its a scandal…

   i am also curious what 120 pound in food looks like… i spend 40 pounds a week… and have two/three carrier bags of fresh healthy vegetables and a few cans…

8. I almost feel that it needs to be legal to go chop a tree down and burn it for fuel if you can’t afford basic heating and cooking fuel. People used to be able to do it when they were poor, now they just have to suffer. I think it needs to be a human right to have access to a small amount of fuel to heat/cook.

9. Some parts of this article make zero sense. Especially the bit regarding charging his wheelchair.

   Article states he has to charge it every night but because of the energy costs he can’t afford to do so, and so he only charges it twice a week. Well I’m a full time wheelchair user and literally only have to charge it once a week and it’s used everywhere I go.

   But on rare occasions I’ll have to charge it twice a week.

10. Thank God he’s paying a fifth of his energy costs on green levies so rich people with enormous land footprints and carbon intensive lifestyles can get massive subsidies on new heating systems and other government funded home improvements.

    We gotta save the planet. Make the poor pay their fair share of costs of tax breaks on a new Tesla.

    That’s why I’m voting green, to patronise the poor and make them fund regressive taxation, to scream at them like they’re stupid rather than accept they have limited capacity for change, and most importantly bring in more counterproductive policies that do little more than redistribute wealth upwards.

    I drive a giant two battery land boat, I’m doing my part for the climate. What has this guy rationing his energy use ever done for the planet?! Huh?!

11. Thank god your leaders didn’t send your kids back to school without vaccines or tell you it was safe to get COVID over and over again. Otherwise most of you would have a loss of ability within a few years, with more and more each surge becoming entirely disabled. Really dodged a bullet there!

12. Cooking does not cost a lot even with current energy prices. Education is the issue here. Lots of poorly educated/low intelligence people don’t understand their energy bill, do things like obsess about turning off 2w led bulbs when they have electric heating. Can’t comprehend how energy costs can vary over several orders of magnitude.

13. “cooking a luxury due to energy bills”.

    So he just spends his whole day eating sandwiches?

    Like realistically, the electricity cost is about 30p per meal.

14. that pot belly tells me something’s not right with this story

15. All of this can be traced back to privatisation.

    If energy and utilities where publicly owned like they were when I was a young child, we could cap the amount that pensioners and disabled people pay for energy at a nominal sum.

    My father worked as an engineer for British Gas before Thatcher sold it off. It is not well known now but before privatisation, British Gas had a social work department so that if an engineer went to cut off the supply to someone who didn’t pay their bills and it was discovered that the householder wasn’t living well due to age/lack of faculties they would halt the disconnection and get the social work dept to attend. He tells me stories of times where it was an old women/man living on their own and the appliances and heating was old and dangerous that the Gas Board would replace the cooker and heating free of charge, would write-off the debt and refer them to the council for other help and assistence where a housing officer would attend and help.

    That was 40 years ago, it had all been dismantled now and will never be allowed to come back.