Government aid to reduce energy bills hardly reaches the people who need it most. This is the conclusion of National Ombudsman Reinier van Zutphen in a report published on Friday.
Subsidies and schemes for sustainability mainly benefit citizens who can easily afford these measures themselves. The group that is ‘threatened to get into trouble’ does not know how to find government regulations ‘well or not at all’, the Ombudsman writes. On municipal websites, information about this is difficult to find or written ‘technically and inaccessibly’. In addition, not everyone can make use of such government schemes.
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The Ombudsman particularly sees a major difference between buyers and tenants. Tenants depend on the pace at which their homeowner wants to make things more sustainable, and can only take small measures in the meantime, such as installing draft strips and radiator foil.
Research institute TNO calculated a year ago that half a million households struggled with energy poverty, about 7 percent of the total. Energy poverty occurs when a household spends a large part of its income – often 13 to 20 percent – on energy. About three-quarters of energy-poor households rent from a housing association. One in eight owns a home, and one in eight rents privately.
The government has made agreements with housing associations about sustainability, although this will take years. Anyone who suffers from energy poverty and rents privately has even more uncertainty. The government seems to pay “too little attention” to this group, the Ombudsman writes. “Not all private landlords are willing or have the means” to quickly become more sustainable.
Subsidy should be more accessible
Anyone who owns a house can, in theory, take measures themselves. But not all buyers have enough money for that. Certainly not for the measures that can reduce the energy bill the most, such as insulation or solar panels. There are subsidies for that, but they only come after the end. By no means all homeowners are able to pre-finance the measures. Earlier this year concluded De Nederlandsche Bank although such subsidies mainly reach the middle and higher incomes.
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These schemes should become more accessible, the Ombudsman believes. And they must be offered “proactively” to energy-poor households. This requires municipalities to know in which neighborhoods the most energy poverty occurs. Some municipalities are doing well in this area, according to the Ombudsman, and are knocking on doors in these neighbourhoods. Other municipalities mainly focus on providing information on their website. These differences between municipalities, Van Zutphen writes, are still “too great”.