Helen reveals another alarming statistic: 90% of those who reach out to the grant scheme are women – the majority of them single mothers.
The mums she speaks to do not heat their homes during the day in winter, instead layering up to survive in a cold house so that they can put the radiators on for a bit when their children come home from school.
Even so, Helen says many kids “regularly keep their coats on at home until they go to bed”.
In the summer, many families eat only cold meals, so as not to use energy on heating up food. “But in the winter, when it's gonna be hot meals, and you need the heating on, I just don't know how it's going to be possible for people,” Helen says.
When we speak, Helen is almost lost for words trying to describe the cruelty of the situation: “It feels like people are being abandoned to face that choice between feeding their kids or having cold homes.
“And looking at this winter, it doesn't even feel like it’s going to be a choice… People are going to be in cold homes, and they're still going to be struggling to feed their kids.”
Parents skipping meals to feed children
In Trowbridge, away from the Beacon Centre, I meet Emma*, a single mother in her early 30s. She tells me over a cup of tea in her kitchen how the spiralling cost of energy is dramatically affecting her and her children’s lives.
Emma used to find that £20 on her pre-payment electric meter would last a fortnight. “Now it doesn’t even last me a week – it’s like five days,” she says.
As a result, she is constantly getting into debt with her energy company, which lends her small top-ups each week but claws the money back from future payments. In the space of a few months, this debt has reached £200 – a huge chunk of her £650 monthly budget, which has to cover everything other than rent.
“This is a struggle mentally,” Emma says. “I suffer anxiety, depression… my money just seems so much less.”
Having recently been forced to sell her car because she couldn’t afford to run it, Emma has had to give up her role as a carer for her grandmother, who lives a two-hour bus journey away. This means she no longer receives any carer’s allowance. Worst of all, it compounds her sense of isolation.
“I used to take her out, do her shopping,” she says, ruefully. “I can’t do it anymore… I miss my nan as well, she's like my mum.”
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