Plunged into fuel poverty

Abstract Fuel poverty, a household’s inability to achieve thermal comfort in line with a healthy standard of living at a reasonable cost, became an increasingly prevalent and visible socio-economic issue in the UK during the 2020–21 winter lockdowns. Using FuelPovertyPressUK, a specialised corpus of UK newspaper reporting, this paper is the first treatment of the discursive representation of fuel poverty as a distinct form of socio-economic inequality. We conduct a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analysis, comparing Pre-COVID-19 Winter (September 2019–March 2020) and During-COVID-19 Winter (September 2020–March 2021) subcorpora. The findings demonstrate that newspaper reporting adequately reflected the increasing heterogeneity of the (new) fuel poor across COVID-19 and ultimately positioned the fuel poor as agentless. The paper highlights the value of corpus methods to linguistics-based and interdisciplinary poverty research and the challenge posed to corpus and discourse studies by analysing the representation of indeterminate and in-flux social groups.