Cold homes kill. As a doctor working in busy emergency departments and general practices, I have seen how vital a warm home is to good health. After all, home is where we all go to get better and heal when we need to recover. But this also means that when our homes are rendered cold, damp, and mouldy by unaffordable bills and poor-quality housing, it can have devastating impacts on our health.

There are political decisions that would help remedy this public health crisis and save lives this year. Yet the government has chosen to take away support instead of increasing it, cutting the much-needed winter fuel allowance, for example. It was recently announced that the energy price cap will rise to £1,736 a year in January. This is 65 percent higher than in winter 2020-21, meaning that we are going through a fourth consecutive winter of an energy bills crisis largely driven by the unchecked profiteering of energy companies and our overreliance on natural gas.

Cold and mouldy homes are intrinsically linked. I’ve seen families come to our general practice because they couldn’t breathe at night, forced to live with rooms full of mould and unable to ventilate their homes because they couldn’t afford to bring the heating back up to liveable temperatures. With nearly half of UK adults likely to ration their energy use this winter, I fear for the many more families facing this situation.

Living in a cold home can make you more likely to have a heart attack or stroke and worsen a range of respiratory health conditions. The Institute of Health Equity estimates that one in five excess winter deaths are due to people living in cold homes. Mouldy homes also increase the likelihood of asthma attacks and can even lead to death, as we saw in the tragic case of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in 2020.

I remember treating an older patient who, after a fall in the night, had to spend the whole night on the floor, unable to get back up. Their condition was made substantially worse as she spent the night freezing because she couldn’t afford to heat the room she slept in. She had to wait for an ambulance to come and help her, and she ended up in hospital because she had lost too much body heat. By the time she arrived in hospital, she had become severely unwell.

The government’s callous decision to cut winter fuel allowance will exacerbate a cost-of-living crisis that many people are struggling to survive, the consequences of which are seen in our waiting rooms in A&E and general practices. These cuts will disproportionately affect those who are already at risk of getting unwell going into this winter: Age UK found that 82 percent or four in every five pensioners set to lose this vital support are living below or just above the poverty line. The government’s own calculations estimate that 50,000 people will be forced into poverty as a direct result of these cuts.

The UK’s health funding is lagging behind that of comparable countries. And while the extra money for GPs and hospitals announced in Rachel Reeves’ recent budget is welcome, this does nothing to address the underlying conditions that make people sick in the first place. In fact, the government’s current actions, including its refusal to tackle profiteering energy companies, are set to exacerbate health and economic inequality. While disabled, elderly and impoverished people have suffered and died in cold homes, the largest 20 energy companies have made nearly half a trillion pounds in profits since the start of the energy bills crisis.

When people have no choice but to live in cold homes, not only is their health affected, but it impacts the health of all of us. It takes away people who are our parents, our friends and our carers and deposits them in an already overwhelmed healthcare system. Health workers are then left with the impossible task of sending patients back to the place that made them sick in the first place.

As a doctor, I am unable to prescribe solutions for many of my patients. Fortunately, we do know what these solutions are: they require the government to have the political and moral will to implement the necessary policies to end this public health crisis and prevent unnecessary deaths.

For a start, we need all homes to have a minimum healthy energy efficiency standards, and we urgently need financial support for households to pay their energy bills this winter and every winter. Policies such as social tariffs, which discount the energy bills of those most in need, or national energy guarantees, which provide every household with a free or cheap amount of energy to cover their essential needs, have long been used across the world. These aren’t radical proposals, they simply guarantee our basic needs.

People should not need healthcare because the place they live in makes them sick. People need homes that allow them to thrive and heal. As we face another winter, we need rapid government action for the health of us all.