Nearly 60% of people with cancer find that their energy bills go up after diagnosis. This isn’t surprising, considering cancer patients often feel the cold more due to their condition and treatment. Plus, they are often spending more time at home, pushing up their fuel bills. These costs can simply be too much for some, with almost one in five switching off their heating because they worry about mounting fuel bills.

Energy-efficient homes are warmer and cheaper to heat, which is a win-win for people living in fuel poverty. But the cost of getting insulation and modern boilers installed is often too much for people already struggling to make ends meet. While energy-efficiency grants are available, the process for accessing them can be complicated. Helping cancer patients keep warm without the worry has been at the heart of our freeze out fuel poverty campaign, so Macmillan welcomes initiatives which can help cancer patients stay warm. 

As part of our campaign, we’re supporting the Energy Bill Revolution petition. This coalition of charities, trade unions, businesses and MPs wants the government to use income from green taxes to fund fuel efficiency projects for UK homes. We need as many of you as possible to sign up to the petition and to ask your MPs to do the same.

It only takes a couple of minutes, so please take part.

After almost 14 months the Welfare Reform Bill has finally reached the end of its journey through Parliament. The Bill passed its final hurdle in the House of Lords last Wednesday and will shortly become law.

So what does it all mean for people with cancer?

Well, we’ve had some good news in the last month about Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The government is sticking to its plan to limit the availability of ESA for some people to just 12 months. But it has now agreed that many people with cancer will continue to receive ESA “while recovering from treatment”. This will ensure that they receive their benefits for longer before the time limit eventually kicks in.

Given how few changes the government has been willing to make to the Bill, this commitment is a significant victory for our campaign. The challenge now is to try and translate this broad commitment into clear, workable guidance that gives people with cancer the protection they need. We’ll be working with the government over the next few months to try to ensure this happens.

Unfortunately, there are still some people with cancer currently claiming ESA who stand to lose their benefits when the Bill is implemented at the end of April. We’ve asked the government to safeguard these people’s benefits until this new guidance is in place. Having made a commitment to protect cancer patients, it’s crucial that the government makes sure that no-one is allowed to slip through the net.

So while we’ve made some real progress in recent months, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. The Welfare Reform Bill may be over, but the Welfare Reform Campaign goes on.

In every campaign there are highs and lows. Sadly, this week has been one of the low points in the Welfare Reform Campaign.

On Wednesday, MPs threw out an amendment from the House of Lords which would have exempted cancer patients from the government’s proposal to time limit Employment and Support Allowance. To cap it all, the government then took advantage of a rarely used parliamentary device to try to limit further opposition from the Lords to their plans.

A few high profile Liberal Democrat MPs – including the party’s former leader, Sir Menzies Campbell – joined Labour MPs on Wednesday in voting for an exemption for cancer patients. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to stop a government victory.

However, the campaign against time limiting isn’t over. We may have lost this week’s vote, but we know that the public are still right behind our campaign. A YouGov poll carried out on behalf of Macmillan this week found that over 70% of people believe that there shouldn’t be a time limit on the amount of time that someone with cancer can receive benefits. And almost 90% of people felt that the Government has a moral duty to ensure that cancer patients are not pushed into poverty by the welfare cuts.

The Bill will now go back to the House of Lords. The government’s procedural manoeuvring means that the Lords won’t be able to table the same amendments again. But there may still be some scope to table amendments that provide some form of extra protection for people with cancer. Over the next few days, we’ll be working with supportive politicians to see if we can find a way forward. As ever, I’ll keep you all posted!

There are some positives though to take from this week. Over the course of the last week hundreds of Macmillan campaigners, supporters and staff have either signed our petition or sent emails, tweets or letters to the MP. All this support has been a huge help to our campaign. We didn’t quite get the result we wanted, but we made sure that our messages were heard in the right quarters. The campaign goes on!

Hello everyone. What a week for our welfare reform campaign! Here in Vauxhall we’re still catching our breath!

A night of high drama in the House of Lords on Wednesday – during which the Government’s Welfare Reform Bill suffered three successive defeats - has given our campaign a remarkable boost. By far the biggest victory of the evening was for an amendment tabled by Lord Patel, which exempts cancer patients from proposals to time limit Employment and Support Allowance to just one year. Over 220 Lords backed the amendment; a figure which surprised even seasoned political commentators.

For many cancer patients one year is simply not long enough to make a recovery. Getting to a point when you’re ready to return to work can take years not months in some cases. We’re delighted therefore that the Lords have had the courage to stand up for cancer patients and act so decisively on their behalf.

The challenge now is to make sure that MPs support the amendment when the Welfare Reform Bill returns to the House of Commons in February. You can help us make our case to MPs by signing our welfare reform petition and asking your friends and family to do the same. The more support we get the stronger our message to MPs will be!

Good campaigning is all about good partnerships. It’s for this reason that we got together last week with 30 other charities, 60 cancer specialists as well as academics, welfare experts and patients. We sent a letter to the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith MP, raising our concerns around the Government’s plan to reform the benefits system.

The letter, which was covered by The Times on Wednesday 14 December, underlines the extent of concerns over the proposed reforms among the cancer community. Right across the sector, people are seriously worried about the impact that measures such as time limiting ESA will have on vulnerable cancer patients. The letter makes it very clear to the Secretary of State that he needs to rethink his plans – now.

However, we haven’t just been campaigning within the cancer community.  We’re also working closely with the Hardest Hit campaign. This alliance of disability organisations and bodies, which represents people with long term health conditions, is equally concerned about the welfare reforms. Last week, the alliance delivered a giant Christmas card to the government. The card called on Ministers to deliver a benefits system that gives a fair deal to the most vulnerable in our society. 

There are plenty of people up and down the country who have also feel compelled to act. Pat Onions, a campaigner on disability issues, has launched an e-petition  on the government website. And George Potter, another welfare reform campaigner, has launched an e-petition that calls on the government to abandon its controversial plans to force cancer patients receiving chemotherapy to undergo an ESA medical assessment in order to prove that they are too ill to work.

We don’t have long to persuade Ministers to change their plans. The Welfare Reform Bill will reach the end of its parliamentary journey early next year. But given the level of concern that exists about the Government’s proposals, we definitely stand a really good chance!