Ensuring the Warm Homes Fund creates genuine impact
With £5bn set aside to improve the energy efficiency of homes and grow retrofit supply chains, the Warm Homes Fund is a major opportunity to learn from the past challenges of delivering retrofit in the UK. Of this £5bn, £3.3bn will be available as innovative finance. The recent DESNZ Call for Evidence explores a wide range of models for using this finance, from consumer offerings and bulk purchasing through to exploring the roles of electricity and gas distribution network companies.
It’s critical that this substantial uplift in funding is spent effectively and delivers real impact for households, communities and the UK at large. Empowering place-based delivery should therefore underpin DESNZ’s approach, and our response to its call for evidence encourages it to ensure local needs and characteristics are at the forefront of the eventual design of the Warm Homes Fund.
While national strategy is critical for setting the vision for a rapid nationwide expansion of retrofit, it is the characteristics of local requirements, knowledge and markets that dictate the actions required to deliver better, warmer homes up and down the UK.
When developing the Warm Homes Fund, the UK government must ensure that there is the flexibility to empower local government to identify the right solutions for their places and then invest and work with the stakeholders that will best enable the scaling and acceleration of retrofit required to meet the bold national targets set out in the Warm Homes Plan.
Our expertise in this area
As part of Regen’s work to deliver a just and rapid transition, we work extensively with local authorities and communities, convening stakeholders, providing expert advice and advocating for policy change. Between 2023 and 2026 we worked with 52 local authorities as part of Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme, providing wide-ranging policy and regulation support, including around retrofit and energy efficiency.
Our report Better Warmer Homes collated key retrofit learnings from the programme, highlighting some critical findings which we strongly encourage DESNZ to consider when developing the Warm Homes Fund:
- Evidence of the health, economic and social benefits of retrofit needs to be considered when assessing the true economic value of retrofit in return on investment models. Current approaches undervalue the upfront investment, which filters from governmental decision making right down to consumer markets.
- Engagement with communities and locally specific approaches to retrofit are critical to achieving the right levels of retrofit quality and consumer trust in the market.
- Local authorities are primary actors in the government’s mission to retrofit five million homes by 2029, but they cannot do it alone. Convening a wider group of key local stakeholders, including community energy groups, skills providers and local contractors and delivering a joined-up approach to scaling local retrofit markets is key.
The central importance of community energy organisations
The Warm Homes Fund, and the Warm Homes Plan more broadly, should acknowledge the importance of the community and third sector in retrofit, identifying them not just as mere recipients of Warm Homes Funding, but as critical enablers of wider place-based retrofit delivery.
With low consumer trust and limited local capacity in retrofit markets, the community energy sector can be a vital enabler. Countless examples already exist of organisations utilising their deep local expertise to deliver retrofit, energy efficiency and fuel poverty support. Many of these programmes are in partnership with local government, offering capacity that reduces organisational pressure on the public sector and gives communities access to trusted and expert voices. Local authorities should be empowered to build upon and/or replicate these successful partnerships using Warm Homes Funding.
Place-based delivery is about bringing together a wide range of local actors from the public, private and community sectors. There are few sectors where it is more relevant than in retrofit, and the Warm Homes Fund must embrace and empower local places if it is to truly supercharge progress.
Get in touch
If you’re interested in discussing our response to this call for evidence or want to hear more about our current work in this space, please reach out to Regen’s heat lead, Peter Griffin.
Regen is a membership organisation – we provide our members with regular updates and market insight, and frequently convene diverse voices from across the sector to discuss key issues affecting the energy transition. If you're interested in Regen membership, see our membership page or reach out to Hannah Stanley.
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