How can a company keep us warm during the winter?

Cadent has created Centres For Warmth across their network to enable customers from vulnerable situations to be warm, safe, and connected.

Fuel for the fire

Cadent delivers energy to some of the most deprived areas in the UK. As the cost of living crisis has spread across the UK, it is estimated that 3.2 million homes are currently experiencing fuel poverty.

Cadent’s Customer Vulnerability Strategy helps them to identify and understand that customers’ circumstances can change quickly, and Cadent wants to be there to support them if they do. By opening 32 Centres for Warmth across the UK in the most vulnerable areas, Cadent has been able to generate a social value of over £25 million.

It's cold outside

Cadent uses funding from their Vulnerability and Carbon Monoxide Allowance to provide not only a place of warmth but also access to food pantries, support with benefit application claims, job clubs, advice on home energy efficiency, support people sign up to the Priority Service Register, provide carbon monoxide alarms and carbon monoxide safety training.

By partnering with local community centres Cadent has been able to effectively identify what the local customers in that area need and provide the necessary funding to make it happen. These free services challenge the traditional boundaries of an Gas distribution company’s role and bring it into the future, as Cadent works to help customers ‘beyond the meter’.

Catch you later

Cadent has pledged to continue with their community support throughout the cost of living crisis and they have already started thinking about what they can do next. By working with existing charities, they plan to expand the types of support offered at the Centres for Warmth. By conducting market research on customers at risk of carbon monoxide leaks and its associated impacts, they hope to continue minimising these risks and educating communities.

Cadent hopes to open further Centres for Warmth in communities around the UK in order to help them provide more for their customers and adapt to the changing requirements of the cost of living crisis.

This case study shows how Cadent supports Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, specifically Target 7.1: "By 2030, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services".

About Cadent

Though only officially founded in 2017, Cadent has roots in the energy business reaching back two-hundred years to the beginning of the gas industry in the UK. Cadent is the UK’s largest gas distributor, fuelling 11 million homes and businesses.

Learn more about Cadent