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.

* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/improving-the-en...

> we need subsidies to make the poor more efficient at using the power they can afford.

They already have grants and subsidies that people can apply for.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/find-energy-grants...

> I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes.

Almost every house and apartment I've lived in had had some sort of insulation and double/triple glazing fitted on the windows. So I found this quite hard to believe so I looked it up.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c19d040f0b...

Official stats from 12 years ago say that ~70% of properties do have cavity wall and loft insulation as of 2013.

> Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.

They are plenty of regulations on how new houses are built on how energy efficient they are. However we cannot build enough housing for a number of numerous reasons to meet current demand.

If the IPCC global climate change projections are accurate then poor UK residents will probably experience smaller effects than poor people in many other countries. So they may see it as less of a concern than short-term energy costs.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar4/wg1/global-climate-projection...