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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 30:3 (2025) ► pp.376–416

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Plunged into fuel poverty

Fuel poverty and the (new) fuel poor in UK newspapers in the winters of 2019–20 and 2020–21

ORCiD logo with link | University of Manchester
 | Lancaster University
ORCiD logo with link | Andrés Bello National University
Published online: 28 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.23167.har
Abstract
Fuel poverty, a household’s inability to achieve thermal comfort in line with a healthy standard of living at a reasonable cost, became an increasingly prevalent and visible socio-economic issue in the UK during the 2020–21 winter lockdowns. Using FuelPovertyPressUK, a specialised corpus of UK newspaper reporting, this paper is the first treatment of the discursive representation of fuel poverty as a distinct form of socio-economic inequality. We conduct a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analysis, comparing Pre-COVID-19 Winter (September 2019–March 2020) and During-COVID-19 Winter (September 2020–March 2021) subcorpora. The findings demonstrate that newspaper reporting adequately reflected the increasing heterogeneity of the (new) fuel poor across COVID-19 and ultimately positioned the fuel poor as agentless. The paper highlights the value of corpus methods to linguistics-based and interdisciplinary poverty research and the challenge posed to corpus and discourse studies by analysing the representation of indeterminate and in-flux social groups.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Fuel poverty in contemporary Britain
    • 2.1Fuel poverty, COVID-19, and the ‘new fuel poor’
    • 2.2Reporting on and representing poverty
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Data collection and corpus building
    • 3.2Analytical approach
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Salient themes in fuel poverty reporting
    • 4.2Changes in the social groups affected by fuel poverty
    • 4.3Agency of the fuel poor
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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