The Ebico Trust is currently supporting the HEAT project [Home Energy Advice Team]. The HEAT project, based on Coventry, provides advice, advocacy and support around all aspects of money advice to vulnerable fuel poor households and including elderly, families with young children, disabled households and black and ethnic minority groups.
The project's uniqueness lies in that it delivers bespoke telephone advice along with fact-to-face advice in the client's home in a holistic way to help deliver a solution to multiple problems faced by the client. Fuel debt is caused by a number of factors [eg poor energy efficiency in the property, low income, poor knowledge about financial systems], and this project will deliver solutions to all of these. Other money advisers in the area are not trained to provide energy advice - while they may enable a client to arrange to pay off a high fuel bill, they cannot give advice which prevents its recurrence.