The UK government’s Warm Homes Plan commits £15 billion to upgrade five million homes with low-carbon heating and energy systems. Louise King and Robert Grover at the University of Bath explain how the plan could transform the nation’s ageing housing stock, but its success depends on delivering improvements that centre on residents’ wellbeing.
The UK government’s Warm Homes Plan, published in January, represents a major commitment to improving the nation’s ageing and inefficient housing stock. The plan sets out £15 billion to upgrade five million homes with low-carbon heating and energy systems, aiming to support both decarbonisation targets and create healthier, more resilient places to live.
The need for transformational action is clear. Poor-quality housing has long been recognised as a significant issue, yet existing policies have failed to deliver change at the scale and pace required. Short-term, inconsistent funding and limited delivery capacity have constrained progress, leaving millions of homes energy inefficient and costly to heat.
The success of the Warm Homes Plan will depend on how improvements are delivered. Beyond technological upgrades alone, it is essential that social justice, trust, place-based delivery and long-term stewardship are prioritised to create sustainable and equitable outcomes that genuinely benefit residents and communities.
Moving beyond the technical
While the Warm Homes Plan is underpinned by decarbonisation and energy efficiency targets, it also places a strong focus on residents’ lived experience. The plan recognises that upgrading the nation’s housing stock is not just a technical challenge, but an opportunity to improve comfort, health and wellbeing, particularly for those affected by fuel poverty.
Research from the University of Bath’s Arts Humanities and Research Council (AHRC)-funded Transforming Homes project underlines the critical role of lived experience. Residents report difficulties with condensation, damp and mould, and rooms they cannot heat adequately. Their priorities emphasise comfort, space and health over abstract energy metrics, underscoring the importance of embedding human experience at the heart of retrofit programmes.
The delivery of improvements must also address trust and quality. Low-quality installation and unresolved issues have been widely reported in the UK. This has undermined trust and confidence in retrofit schemes – key factors that affect access and engagement. Ensuring consistent communication, transparency and quality with accessible redress mechanisms will be essential to rebuilding trust and supporting participation.
Delivering equitable outcomes
The Warm Homes Plan allocates £5 billion to support full retrofit packages and a commitment to lift one million families out of fuel poverty. This demonstrates an understanding of the disproportionate impact of high energy costs and poor housing conditions on the most vulnerable residents. Targeted investment is critical in delivering a just transition, mitigating the impact of high energy costs on vulnerable households while strengthening markets, supply chains and workforce capacity.
Still, reliance on resident-led funding applications may limit uptake. Co-ordinated local support will be critical to remove barriers to access, ensuring low carbon and smart energy technologies reach low-income households, enabling vulnerable residents to benefit fully from the programme. Focusing on inclusive and sustained community engagement will be key to tackling inequity – funding availability alone will not deliver urgent change where it is needed most.
Place truly matters
The Warm Homes Plan marks a shift towards a place-based approach, positioning local authorities and housing associations at the centre of delivery. This is a critical step in recognising the embeddedness of homes within wider neighbourhoods. Adopting a place-based approach enables coordinated improvements across diverse infrastructure. For example, it supports neighbourhood energy provision at scale, including heat networks, thereby providing opportunities for efficient and cost-effective delivery. Moreover, it aligns housing transformation with health, planning and community priorities.
Distributed decision-making enables residents and communities to shape choices that reflect their lived experiences and local needs. In the Transforming Homes project, we have observed how individuals, experts in their own homes and neighbourhoods, can contribute their knowledge to provide valuable insights that lead to better-informed decisions. This not only supports community ownership of transitions and decisions that affect everyday life, but also results in more targeted and higher-quality outcomes.
Neighbourhoods often comprise a mix of social housing, private rental and owner-occupied homes. Delivering the Warm Homes Plan will require coordinated action across these tenures, supported by flexible funding mechanisms and collaboration between public, private and third sector stakeholders. While local authorities are widely recognised as well positioned to lead this transformation, sufficient capacity and long-term funding certainty will be essential for effective delivery.
Furthermore, the plan sets out the establishment of a Warm Homes Agency to provide national coordination and oversight on standards, consumer protection and wider systemic coherence. Clarity will be a cornerstone of success, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, mechanisms for sharing best practice and support for community innovation. Those responsible for delivering the plan would also benefit from learning from previous large-scale programmes that failed to reflect local diversity. Retaining flexibility and enabling locally-focused innovation will be fundamental to its success.
What does success look like?
The Warm Homes Plan sets out clear ambitions, but how success is measured will inevitably shape what is delivered. While predicted performance metrics such as energy efficiency and carbon reductions remain, meaningful change will also require evaluating lived experience – including thermal comfort, damp and mould reduction, health and wellbeing, satisfaction and trust. The plan presents an opportunity to prioritise these broader outcomes that are central to lasting improvement.
One of the most significant gaps in current retrofit policy relates to post-installation support. Implementing the plan must include a clear strategy for maintaining and managing homes while adapting to a changing climate. Residents may require support to operate new technologies; maintenance services should be transparent and easily accessible. Clear feedback loops will be essential to improve performance and ensure accountability. Without this, there is a risk of underperformance, system subversion and damage to trust.
An opportunity for meaningful change
The Warm Homes Plan presents a significant opportunity to align housing, energy and wellbeing in the UK. It offers the potential to deliver healthier, more resilient homes and communities, and represents a positive and ambitious step towards meaningful change. But, to realise its full potential, the human experience must be at its core, embedding place and social justice in the plan’s delivery. The challenge now is to ensure implementation that is not only effective, but also equitable, trusted and capable of creating lasting change.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
