Energy poverty: the state cuts five programmes, and households will pay for the heating

According to Reporterre, which picks up reporting from Politico published on Wednesday 28 October, the government is ending at least five programmes against energy poverty. They helped low-income households and local authorities, and will not be renewed at the end of the year. Funded by energy saving certificates (certificats d'économies d'énergie, or CEE, the French scheme that obliges energy suppliers to fund efficiency measures), they represented around 100 million euros in 2026. Among them: Actee, Toits d'abord and Territoires zéro exclusion énergétique. The full list does not appear in the extract we have, and we do not yet know how many households are affected, or the reasons the government has given. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Start with a picture. A winter, in a badly insulated flat: the coat stays on through dinner, a saucepan of water is heated so the room feels less cold, the children all sleep in the same bedroom, the only one that is heated. This is what these programmes were meant to prevent. It is not a budget line. It is a kitchen, a bathroom, an evening.

Marxist feminist theorists speak of social reproduction: all the work that produces people rather than commodities. Cooking, caring, raising children, keeping a home habitable. This labour is unpaid or badly paid, mostly carried out by women, and filed away outside "the economy". When an aid for renovation or for supporting households is withdrawn, this work does not vanish. It shifts into the home. Someone will have to settle the bill, watch the thermostat, nurse the lingering cough, juggle heating against everything else.

Who will that someone be? Our hypothesis, which the facts will have to confirm: most often, the women who already run the household. Alexandra Kollontai described the woman on whom capitalism imposed wage labour without lightening her burden as housekeeper and mother. A century later, the logic is recognisable: low-income households are asked to absorb what the collective stops taking on.

It will be objected that 100 million euros is small change for a state budget. Exactly. If the sum is modest, the choice is revealing: it is on this kind of scheme, discreet and without powerful lobbies, that budget discipline is first exercised. Local authorities, also affected, will have to either fill the gap or give up.

There remain concrete questions the government should answer publicly. Will these programmes be replaced? By what? With what resources? And what becomes of the teams and associations that ran them, that is, employees whose job is precisely to look after others?

Meanwhile, winter, for its part, does not get renewed at the end of the year: it arrives, with or without a programme. And the bill, for its part, always has an address.