More people can afford to keep their homes warm in winter

Official Eurostat statistics show that in 2024, 9.2 percent of all European Union citizens found it difficult to keep their homes warm in winter, in other words, they could not afford their electricity, water and gas bills. The rate in Malta is substantially lower than countries such as Greece, Spain, France, Cyprus, Lithuania and Portugal and also lower than Italy and Slovakia, while it is almost at the same level as the Netherlands. When compared to the rate of this same indicator in 2013, one finds that in Malta we had 23.9 percent of the population who could not afford their electricity, water and gas bills, while the European average at that time was 10.8 percent. In other words, since 2013, while the European average has only decreased by 1.6 percentage points, in Malta the rate has decreased by 16.1 percentage points. In other words, while in 2013 we had one person in four who could not afford their energy bills, today we have one person in thirteen who cannot afford this. While in 2013 we had 99,000 people who could not afford these bills, in 2024 this has dropped to 43,000. Minister for Social Policy and Children's Rights Michael Falzon attributed this to the policy of this Government which, after substantially reducing energy bills in 2014, also kept them stable through subsidies after 2020, and claimed that the result of economic growth is meaning more creation and distribution of wealth and money in hand. Minister Falzon concluded by saying that this is another confirmation of how much the Maltese and Gozitan people are benefiting from the strong economy that our country has.