Every fourth person in Europe has heating difficulties
The proportion of energy-poor households in the European Union (EU) has risen drastically – this is revealed by the results of a new research by Századvég.
According to the study, on average, one in four households in the EU struggles with heating difficulties and utility bill arrears. Only for the utility reduction program The involvement of Hungary in the former problem it is the second smallest, in the latter it is the third smallest. It was reminded, based on Eurostat data, of households in the European Union in 2021
- 6.9 percent (13.5 million households, 29.9 million people) were unable to heat their homes sufficiently for existential reasons
- and 6.4 percent (12.6 million households, 27.7 million individuals) struggled with payment arrears.
The autumn 2022 data collection, which has just been made public, predicts a “dramatic deterioration” of the situation: it seems that due to the increase in energy prices, a significant part of the population has become affected by these two problems.
26 percent of European citizens (more than 100 million people) cannot heat their homes properly
– this can be established based on the results of the End of the Century Europe Project research.
The state safety net of Pelemás
In the survey of the Szadvég Foundation, it can also be read that the increase in energy prices caused by the intensifying trade conflict between Russia and Europe poses increasingly serious challenges to EU countries. Various official instruments are used to prevent the price explosion from affecting residential tariffs, but their effectiveness varies considerably.
The most protective utility subsidy system operates in Hungary, where officially fixed tariffs ensure the lowest household energy prices in the EU. Százvéged writes about this: in the countries that apply the permitted regulations, however, families have faced an extremely high price increase in the recent period, which – if it was not compensated by a sufficiently high income or state transfer –
it put households in an existentially vulnerable situation.
However, just as in the rise in residential tariffs, there are significant member differences in the number of people struggling with heating difficulties.
The Finns, the Hungarians and the Danes
According to the survey, Greece is in the most difficult situation, where more than half of the respondents (56 percent) stated that they are unable to heat their homes adequately. The second and third most serious situations can be seen in Portugal and France: in both countries, a third of the population (34-34 percent) have difficulties in ensuring a sufficient temperature.
The least affected are Finland (10 percent), Hungary (14 percent), and Austria and Denmark (14 percent each).
It can also be read from the results that every fourth respondent was unable to pay one of their utility bills on time due to a lack of funds at least once in the past year (compared to the autumn data collection). The situation in this category is also the most serious in Greece, where 51 percent of the adult population is affected.
furthermore, more than a third of the population has payment difficulties in Cyprus (37 percent), as well as in Ireland and Bulgaria (35 percent and 35 percent respectively). The relative position of Hungary is also favorable in the category of arrears: the affected rates are the third lowest, 18 percent, after Austria (14 percent of payments) and the Czech Republic (16 percent). He notes that notary differences for those affected by heating and payment difficulties are – in addition to registry tariffs – influenced by the income conditions of the given country and other transfers provided to compensate for the fees.
What was this calculated from?
The EU-SILC survey, which is the basis of Eurostat, and the End of the Century survey cannot be compared one-to-one due to the different methodology. Századvég therefore underlined that the differences in the results are good indicators of the worsening trend. In addition to the member states of the European Union, the Europe 2022 Project covered the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Moldova, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. A total of 38,000 randomly selected adults I was interviewed using the CATI method between October 13 and December 7.