Approved Research

Housing and health: improving understanding of how energy-inefficient housing affects health, including establishing a new housing-health data linkage

Lay summary

Background

13% of UK households were classed as fuel poor in 2020 - though this may rise to 30% of (8.2 million) households next winter or higher - and the impacts on health can be severe. Energy poverty is often caused by insufficient income together with living in poor-quality housing with little thermal insulation, and high energy prices.

Cold homes and fuel poverty harm both mental and physical health, even causing severe illness or death. The short-term health effects are well studied, but cold, difficult-to-heat housing is likely to be harming health in longer-term ways too, particularly for people on low incomes. Poor quality housing also harms the environment and our economy; for example, its health impacts cost the NHS around £1.3 billion/year.

Aims

To improve understanding of the impact of living in an energy-inefficient home on important risk factors like blood pressure and cholesterol.

To investigate the impact of living in an energy-inefficient home on the rate at which people develop chronic health problems over time, and the other factors which influence this.

Involvement of people with lived experience of these issues will shape the questions and approach for each project, and how we make sense of and explain what we find out.

Rationale: what research is needed and why?

It has often been hard to study this issue in the past because housing and health data are rarely linked, and/or because some studies have only included small numbers of people (so they can only study common health problems), or don't cover a long time. This study aims to bring together detailed information about the energy performance of people's homes with Biobank's detailed health data in order to look at risk factors for important poor health outcomes, such as high blood pressure, overweight and obesity and high cholesterol, as well as links with a range of physical and mental health conditions over time.

Duration

This PhD is funded by a 3-year NIHR PhD Fellowship, with the data linkage, data cleaning and analysis for this UK Biobank element of the Fellowship intended to be largely complete within the first 2 years.

Public health impact

The project aims to help to inform better national policy decisions (e.g. by feeding into economic models about costs and benefits of making homes more energy-efficient). A plain English summary (developed with PPI involvement), blogs and infographics, media articles and interviews, and a series of public events will help share the findings.