What do we mean by clean heat neighbourhoods?
Our vision of what clean heat neighbourhoods are
ALPHA
Our vision of clean heat neighbourhoods
Britain needs to increase the pace of low-carbon heat adoption, and we believe that a coordinated switch will help achieve this goal.
Clean heat neighbourhoods is our proposed approach to enabling a coordinated, area-based switch to low-carbon heat. This could look like a local authority-wide collective purchasing scheme for air source heat pumps, a shared ground loop scheme for several roads, or a heat network across part of a city.
We think this will involve a few key steps: identifying groups of households where many homes could benefit from a specific approach, developing area-based schemes covering many homes, and then supporting households in that area to join the scheme.
We think local authorities should have a big role in this. This should definitely include a leading role in planning the heating transition. It might include delivering, organising and procuring schemes, or it might be about facilitating and encouraging delivery by the private sector.
We advocate an approach to clean heat planning that covers all tenures and all technologies.
All tech, all tenures
Every neighbourhood has a mix of tenures - owner-occupier, private rental, social housing - and this mix requires a wider set of technologies for an area-based transition to work.
Current policies have mainly focused on air-source heat pumps and heat networks but some homes may benefit from other technologies due to their size or structural constraints.
An all tech, all tenures approach ensures that no households are left behind in the clean heat transition.
Individual heat sources
Networked heat pumps
Communal heat sources
District heat networks
Steps to creating clean heat neighbourhoods
The journey to creating clean heat neighbourhoods can look something like this:
Our view on the importance of local government
Local authorities play a central role in the switch to clean heat. They have a granular understanding of their local housing stock, are invested in the local economy, and have existing relationships with residents, landlords and supply chain.
With the new Warm Homes Plan focusing on area-based delivery, this playbook is designed to give local authorities a practical framework to plan and deliver at scale.
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