As the cold closes in around London and energy bills across Britain climb ever higher, most households can at least cling to the protection of the Government’s energy price cap. But for an overlooked and growing group of Londoners, that shield simply does not exist. Sebastien Cippe, a nurse who lives in Rusper Court, a modest block just a short walk from Stockwell Station, is one of them. His home is part of a heat network, meaning he does not pay an energy provider directly. Instead, his heating and hot water arrive through a communal oil boiler, and the cost appears not as a utility bill but as a service charge from Lambeth Council. And that charge has exploded. In 2019, Sebastien paid £1,211.32 for heating. This year, he is expected to pay £3,867.49 — a staggering 300% increase. For a man who spends his working life caring for others, the burden has become unbearable. He no longer sleeps properly. He has sought counselling through his job. He works extra shifts not to buy luxuries, but simply to cover a bill he cannot control. “It is a constant stress,” he says quietly. “I am losing sleep and having to get counselling at work. I am working extra shifts just to be able to afford the service charge. I am dreading the cost of more repairs.” His story is not an isolated tale of financial woe. It is a portrait of a housing system that has quietly left thousands of people exposed to the full force of the energy crisis, with no price cap, no choice of supplier, and no way to switch off the cost.
To understand why Sebastien and his neighbours are so vulnerable, it helps to look at how their homes are actually heated. Rusper Court does not have individual boilers tucked into kitchen cupboards or airing closets. Instead, one centralised boiler — a vast, oil-fed machine sitting behind the block — produces hot water that is pumped through pipes into every flat. Residents cannot set their own heating schedules in the way most people can. They cannot decide to use less energy and watch their bill fall. They certainly cannot shop around for a cheaper tariff. The system works on a communal basis, and the council, as the network operator, recovers the cost by dividing the building’s total energy spending among the leaseholders. On top of that, residents are required to contribute to maintenance and repairs, even though they have no say in which contractors are hired, what work is done, or how the costs are allocated. And because the boiler runs on oil and is paid for through a service charge rather than a direct mains gas or electricity connection, the entire building is exempt from the energy price cap. That cap, which has saved millions of ordinary households from the worst of the global price surge, simply does not apply to them. It does not matter if residents choose to keep their radiators off all winter, or even if they leave the flat empty for months. The service charge still arrives. The boiler still needs to be fed. And the soaring price of oil, inflamed by international conflict and market instability, is passed on directly to the people who live there.
For Sebastien, the injustice is made worse by the fact that he has tried to find a way out. He has asked Lambeth Council, again and again, whether he can install his own combi boiler inside his flat. He knows it is possible, because some of the other flats in the building already have their own independent boilers. But the council has refused. No explanation has been able to soothe his frustration. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” he says. “It then puts more of the costs on the residents who were refused their own boiler.” That is a crucial point. Each time someone is allowed to leave the communal network, the remaining residents are left to shoulder a larger share of the central boiler’s running costs. The network becomes smaller, but the fixed costs do not shrink. So those who are denied individual boilers end up subsidising the system, trapped in a cycle of rising charges and shrinking options. Steven Schroder, another Rusper Court resident, knows that trap all too well. His heating bills have risen from £998.54 in 2019 to £2,224.17 this year. In the twelve months from 2024 to 2025, he was charged £3,249 after being hit with just under £1,000 for boiler repairs and maintenance. He lives alone in a one-bedroom flat, yet his heating and hot water charges are so high they feel more like the bills of a family home. “This has placed a considerable strain on me and is also difficult to understand,” he says. The strain is not just financial. It is the anxiety of watching a bill arrive and not knowing how to pay it. It is the shame of having to ask for help. It is the exhaustion of working longer hours and still feeling like the ground is shifting beneath you.
Even for those who try to make sense of the numbers, clarity is almost impossible. Another resident, a woman living in a three-bedroom flat, has watched her heating service charge climb from £1,486.42 in 2019 to £3,310.87 in the most recent billing period. She has asked for a simple breakdown of why her costs have more than doubled, but no such breakdown has been provided. What makes this especially frustrating is that other parts of the service charge are transparent. “On the service charge bill, nearly every item listed includes a total estate cost, then the individual property cost, and repairs are all listed out yearly with their costs for transparency,” she explains. “The exception to this is heating and hot water. I do not get visibility of the total estate cost, only the property cost, so there is no transparency that I can find around cost per unit of energy and what my fair share is.” Without that transparency, residents are expected to pay astronomical sums on trust. They have no way of knowing whether the oil was purchased at a fair price, whether the boiler is being run efficiently, or whether their share of the bill is proportionate. They are simply told to pay, and if they cannot, they risk falling into arrears and facing legal action. Liberal Democrat councillor Tamora Langley, who has been campaigning on behalf of the residents, says they are being placed under “extreme stress.” She has pleaded with Lambeth Council to show fairness. “The council need to make sure all leaseholders are being treated fairly,” she insists. “Right now, they have no control over their heating costs. This has to change.”
The problem, however, extends far beyond Rusper Court. Across Lambeth, similar heat networks are causing similar suffering. In Wedgwood House, residents have previously told Metro they have been forced into debt to pay for heating — even during heatwaves, when the heating was not needed but the charges still fell due. Their plight has now reached the courts, with a judicial review granted after Richard Clayton KC concluded that the claimants’ grounds are “realistically arguable” and raise wider issues of law and public importance. The scale of the crisis is difficult to overstate. A Freedom of Information request revealed that Lambeth Council served 801 eviction notices to tenants over debts arising from heat networks in 2024 alone. That is hundreds of households facing the terrifying prospect of losing their homes because they could not afford a basic human need. And this is not just a Lambeth problem. The Social Market Foundation estimates that as many as 900,000 households across the United Kingdom rely on communal heating systems, including one in every twelve households living in social housing. For these families, there is no switch to a cheaper supplier, no warm home discount automatically applied, no price cap to catch them when prices spiral. They are tied to one system, one provider, one bill, and one increasingly desperate choice: pay or face the consequences. The human cost is immense. Behind every statistic is a parent skipping meals to keep the radiators running, an older person sitting in the cold because they are afraid of the next bill, a key worker like Sebastien who is breaking under the strain of trying to do the right thing.
As the winter months stretch ahead, Sebastien and his neighbours are left waiting for a solution that may never come. The global price of oil may eventually fall, but the damage to their finances and their mental health has already been done. They are not asking for free heat. They are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the same protections, the same transparency, and the same basic dignity that millions of other energy customers take for granted. They want to understand what they are paying for, to know that their money is being spent wisely, and to have some control over the temperature in their own homes. They want to be able to live without the constant dread of a letter through the letterbox. They want to be able to sleep at night. The councillor is right: this has to change. Lambeth Council has the power to be more open, more compassionate, and more responsive. It can choose to treat leaseholders as partners rather than as captive payers. It can offer realistic payment plans, independent advice, and a genuine pathway for those who wish to leave the collective system. It can stop issuing eviction notices and start issuing solutions. But until that happens, stories like Sebastien’s will continue to unfold in blocks across London. Nurses will keep working extra shifts just to stay warm. Families will keep wondering whether they can afford to turn on the heating. And the cold will keep creeping in, not just through the walls, but into the heart of every person who has been left to face it alone. The real cost of this crisis cannot be measured in pounds alone. It is measured in lost sleep, lost health, lost security, and the quiet, grinding fear that no matter how hard you work, you may never be able to keep warm in your own home.
