A man who runs a charity to help people keep their boilers running during the cost of living crisis said he's "never seen things this bad".
James Anderson is the founder of DEPHER (Disabled and Elderly Heating Emergency Repairs) - a charity set up to help people keep their their boilers and heating running. In the face of soaring fuel and food costs the charity does much more than that - filling empty fridges and cupboards, paying bills and bailiffs and even buying nappies.
James said he cries everyday when he sees people driven to suicide and despair by the crisis. He said: "I cry every day. I've never seen things this bad."
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James, born in Liverpool but now based in Burnley, said "no one from the Government or any public body are coming to help" and added "people will be dying this winter".
The 54-year-old told the Mirror: “One old lady needed a new boiler, we were trying to get one for her, she had no heating or hot water. There was a dish of what I thought were sweets on the table. When I looked closely they were tablets.
“She told me she’d been going to take them all, said she couldn’t take anymore and wanted to disappear. I arrived at another house to find an 84-year-old lady with a noose around her neck.
“You think, ‘this can’t be happening’ but it is. I just went to see a family - the mum rang crying her eyes out because she couldn’t feed her kids. This is affecting everyone. But if you’re in poverty we’ll help you, that’s all there is to it.”
James said things have got worse since he set up the charity in 2017. He was moved to act after meeting an elderly man who was scammed for £5,500 by a plumbing firm - and to do something good in memory of his baby son William.
William was born with a back-to-front heart and underwent surgery in 2013. He and wife, Barbara, 47, had to turn off the machines keeping him alive, when he was just 16 weeks old. It was a dark time for James but helping others became a way to channel his grief and honour William.
James said: “I thought about William. The day he died I made a promise to him that I would be the man he would have grown up to be, that I’d make him proud.
“I got the firm to come back and make good what they’d done - I made sure he got a new boiler for free - but I couldn’t sleep. I was up two or three times thinking about all the other people in his position.
“Heating is such an important part of feeling safe and warm but when it goes wrong people just don’t have the funds to put it right and they’re vulnerable to being exploited. There was a UN report that said 17,000 people in the UK had died because of the cold - our government wasn’t even acknowledging that.
“I thought, ‘if the government won’t do anything, I will’.”
In 2017 he set up the community interest company - placing ads on social media offering free help for people who needed it. He said people questioned at first if it was true - but added: "It’s got to be done, we’ve got to be human again. If you need us, we’ll be there.”
James, who won a Pride of Manchester award last month, has provided £1.2m of support to people across Burnley and now the wider UK. He puts the profits from his own company into the charity and tops it up by fundraising and running a community shop.
James said: “We saw a woman last week. She had nothing. What does it do to a kid when they see their mum not able to feed them, when they know there’s no food? It’s very scary. They don’t know if it’s going to be alright.
“We topped up her gas and electric, got her shopping, filled the fridge. I got the kids sweets and the eight-year-old said, ‘thank you’ then told me he’d thought they were going to die.
“The government need to understand what’s happening, what’s needed, how people are living.”
