Net zero living
Through Innovate UK's Net Zero Living Programme, places across the UK have taken major strides towards achieving their net zero ambitions, breaking through numerous non-technological barriers. Regen provided expert support on policy and regulation, generating a wealth of insights from more than 50 wide-ranging projects.
At the end of 2025, we held a three-month dissemination phase, with the aim of helping other local authorities understand how they might forge similar paths – and to help national decision makers and policy-shapers identify how they can better harness the value of place-based innovation.
Below you will find papers, podcasts and blogs from the dissemination phase, focused around three themes critical for many places: retrofitting buildings, empowering communities, and how to bring in finance to deliver impactful projects.
We know that action at the local level is the cheapest and most effective way to deliver net zero. Collaboration is vital to enabling this and delivering a transition that works for the needs of local people. Regen helps local authorities translate the distinct needs of their people and places into strategies that bring jobs, investment and resilience alongside decarbonisation.
Buildings and Retrofit
Innovative, place-based approaches are accelerating retrofit across the UK, helping to deliver warmer homes and lower bills while stimulating business growth. Throughout December 2025 we will be sharing insights from the Net Zero Living places and technical advisers, showing how local authorities can use their assets, power and voice to unlock the local retrofit markets of the future. We’ll explore how local authorities have successfully piloted and scaled new approaches, in partnership with the private sector.
We’ve identified three key areas for action:
1. Quantifying ‘the size of the prize’ in terms of wider health, social and economic value
2. Growing a local retrofit market
3. Building skills for retrofit.
Scroll down to watch to the webinar, read the insight paper and blogs and listen to the podcast.
Insights from the Net Zero Living Programme: Buildings and Retrofit
Watch webinar
Better Warmer Homes
The Net Zero Living Programme has shown that local authorities have a central and wide-ranging role to play in supporting innovative and place-based retrofit programmes which are scalable and replicable. Better Warmer Homes shares learnings for how their power as convenors, governors and asset managers can be used as powerful tools to accelerate innovative, place-based retrofit.
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Regen's Poppy Maltby is joined by David Pierpoint of The Retrofit Academy and Kate Spalding from Fife Council to explore why retrofit is central to tackling fuel poverty, public health and net zero.
Community empowerment
Community participation helps create stronger, more inclusive solutions that deliver better, more equitable outcomes. Throughout January 2026 we are sharing insights from the Net Zero Living places and technical advisers, showing how local authorities have gone beyond traditional consultation approaches, supported by engagement specialists. These approaches demand time and resources, yet the rewards are high.
We focus on three main ways that local authorities have empowered their communities to drive change:
1. Bringing people into decision making
2. Spreading the wealth through collaboration
3. Sharing information and tools.
Scroll down to watch the webinar, read our blogs and insight paper and listen to the podcast.
Insights from the Net Zero Living Programme: Community Empowerment
Watch webinarCommunities Driving Change
Across the Net Zero Living programme, local authorities demonstrated leadership in
designing enabling conditions critical to empowering communities and delivering a better, fairer and faster transition to net zero. This paper sets out the three overarching lessons that emerged for councils to support effective engagement, decision making and community-led action.
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Regen's Poppy Maltby is joined by Fraser Stewart of GB Energy, Charlotte Norton of the Carbon Trust and Alex Templeton of Community Infrastructure CIC to explore the role of community engagement, leadership and ownership in the net zero transition.
Planning, pipeline and finance
Local authorities are uniquely placed to build a vision for their area and attract the public and private investment needed to realise it, unlocking wide-ranging benefits for their communities and business growth. Through the Net Zero Living Programme, local authorities collaborated with specialist partners to develop innovative approaches that can help projects progress more quickly from planning to delivery. In different ways, they are streamlining processes, stimulating markets and overcoming market failures, enabling the scaling up of action while managing risk.
We focus on three key stages of project delivery for local authorities:
1. Developing plans and defining roles to maximise impact
2. Building a project pipeline, ready for investment
3. Securing finance by leveraging their unique assets and market position.
Scroll down to watch the webinar, read the insight paper and blogs and listen to the podcast.
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Insights from the Net Zero Living Programme: Planning, Pipeline and Finance
Watch the webinarInvesting in Places
The Net Zero Living Programme has shown that local and regional authorities are uniquely placed to build a vision with their communities for how to transition to net zero, and then work to attract the investment needed to realise it. This is unlocking benefits for many places, including warmer homes, lower bills, improved health and business growth. Investing in Places shares insights to help local authorities move faster from project planning to delivery and turn ideas into investable propositions.
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Regen’s Poppy Maltby is joined by Christine Zhou of Bankers Without Boundaries and Louise Wilson from Abundance Investment to explore how local authorities are building their understanding and confidence to attract private sector investment into their projects and places.
