Poor people tend to rent, don't have money to invest in better insulation or higher quality housing.
Good news is the UK government has been increasing, and wants to further increase*, the legal minimum energy efficiency of rental properties.
The bad news is the current* UK requirement is still so low that the 39 m^2 apartment I let out in the UK costs more to heat *badly*, than my 100-ish m^2 new passiv-ish house in Germany costs to be T-shirt temperature inside while watching the snow fall outside. (And that UK apartment is one of the better ones in the building; I used to live in it, one of my requirements when buying was double glazing, not all the apartments in that building had double glazing).
Also bad news is that my agency is telling me to not do anything more than the legal minimum to upgrade it, that I should instead wait for the requirements to get stricter before actually doing anything more.
Of course they absolutely do actually get things upgraded when rules change. In the UK, changing the rules does work.
Good news is the UK government has been increasing, and wants to further increase*, the legal minimum energy efficiency of rental properties.
The bad news is the current* UK requirement is still so low that the 39 m^2 apartment I let out in the UK costs more to heat *badly*, than my 100-ish m^2 new passiv-ish house in Germany costs to be T-shirt temperature inside while watching the snow fall outside. (And that UK apartment is one of the better ones in the building; I used to live in it, one of my requirements when buying was double glazing, not all the apartments in that building had double glazing).
Also bad news is that my agency is telling me to not do anything more than the legal minimum to upgrade it, that I should instead wait for the requirements to get stricter before actually doing anything more.
Of course they absolutely do actually get things upgraded when rules change. In the UK, changing the rules does work.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/improving-the-en...