With rising heating bills on everyone’s mind, Dorset Community Foundation and its partners at Citizens Advice are warning the Surviving Winter Appeal – which will be launched soon – will be needed more than ever,

“I think it is fair to say we have not seen anything like this before and demand is not slowing,” said Katrina Ford, business development manager for Citizens Advice East Dorset & Purbeck, which works with the foundation on behalf of CABs across the county.

“We are concerned with what the demand is going to be like and more than ever the funding from Surviving Winter is going to be vitally important.”

Last year Citizens Advice distributed almost £86,400 raised by Dorset Community Foundation. It awarded £200 fuel grants to 432 older and vulnerable people across the county. In addition its Fighting Fuel Poverty team contacted each recipient to offer energy-saving advice and worked with them to see if they were entitled to extra benefits.

It helped one recipient write-off an energy debt with a grant from an energy trust and to apply for funding to repair her boiler. It also helped her apply for an extra £151 a month in benefits she was entitled to.

She told the team: “You have not just helped me; you have given me tools to help myself. You are a brilliant, amazing group of people who have completely changed my mind set and I can’t thank you enough.”

Mrs Ford said: “We are seeing younger clients coming through, more younger families and people who are in full-time work.

“It is great that there is targeted help for the most vulnerable but we are seeing this different demographic coming through for help and the costs they face are impossible to meet.”

She said in previous years enquiries about fuel bill have tailed off when the weather warmed up. “There was no break last summer and there’s no been break this summer,” she said.

Dorset Community Foundation director Grant Robson said: “We are delighted that we will again have the expertise and know-how of Citizens Advice to lean on during what is going to be a very difficult autumn and winter.

“No one needs explaining why it is going to be so tough and we will be relying on the wonderful donors who given us such generous support over the last 12 years to do so again. In previous years we have always asked people who feel they don’t need their government Winter Fuel Allowance to ‘recycle’ it so we can give it to someone in need.

“This year fewer people might feel they are in that position because the cost of living crisis is cutting far deeper but we hope they will still be generous and help us because cold homes and poor diet can be killers and every year 400 people in our county die because of cold-related illness.”

Last year the CAB’s team was able to help some people switch to cheaper tariffs but with the collapse of dozens of smaller companies that option has gone.

Mrs Ford said: “We still offer our income maximisation as well as the energy advice. “But that is difficult when you talk to people who are in two income households and they are still unable to cope. Where do you go from there? Things are already bad but what they are going to be like in the autumn just doesn’t bear thinking about right now.”

Find out more about Surviving Winter and how to donate at dorsetcf.org.uk.