Money expert Martin Lewis has issued a warning to state pensioners – and indeed anyone – who is planning to ‘heat the human, not the home’ to stay warm without heating this winter.
After the £300 Winter Fuel Payment was axed and the £300 Cost of Living payment also retired last year, when combined with rising energy bills, state pensioners in particular will be hard hit financially this winter.
As a result, many pensioners and other vulnerable groups in the UK will be looking to Martin’s ‘survival guide’ among other money saving tips to try to get by for as long as possible without running the heating this year.
Tips include using USB heated gloves or gilets, or battery powered heated jackets, or ‘oodie’ blanket/hoodie crossovers, instead of switching the heating on.
Other tips include putting foil behind your radiator to reflect heat back into the room and using ‘tactical curtains’, which involves opening them in sunlight and closing them again when it’s cloudy.
But Martin warned that all of these efforts are ‘tinkering at the edges’ and none will have the same impact as simply switching off the price cap.
Martin said: “Two winters ago I briefed my team that I wanted an article, and I worked with them on it, that made me very uncomfortable to request it, because I believed it was wrong that we should be doing it but we did it and it was called Heat the Human, not the Home.
“The problem with doing that is it can hurt literally the structure of your house by doing that, keeping it cold but keeping yourself warm.
“If we’re talking desperation, most people have already turned most things off. Heat the human is about USB gloves and gilets that you can plug in and have very very minimal usage and you don’t turn the heating on so you keep your body warm when your house is cold.
“Insulating your house, putting tin foil behind your radiators, tactical curtains. But I’ll be honest most of that is tinkering at the edges and is not going to impact a 10 percent rise in prices which is why you need to get off the price cap.”
