Home energy efficiency schemes are intended to make our homes warmer and our bills lower. They work by insulating our homes so that heat doesn’t get lost. A non-departmental body for homes, a Warm Homes Agency, will ensure home efficiency schemes meet their full potential, so that Britain insulates as many homes as possible. In the right conditions, Agencies deliver on long term objectives for government, with oversight and strategic direction set by politicians.
Obstacles facing home efficiency schemes
To understand why a Warm Homes Agency is so necessary, its vital to look at what’s happening on the ground right now.
A number of local authorities are facing similar obstacles – from delays to constantly changing schemes. One council E3G spoke to had spent only a fifth of their allocated home insulation grant during the first year of delivery. First, painstaking negotiation between the council and central government delayed procurement. Then lengthy Westminster processes to release funds to the council left local contractors without any work to do. Understandably, the local contractors took on other work, delaying their return to the council scheme when the work was eventually approved.
Local authorities have had to deal with five different schemes in the last 4 years, and a sixth is due to start next year. The disjointed nature of consecutive short schemes stops councils and housing associations from building any momentum. By the time councils build a functioning system, the funding dries up and they must learn how to navigate a new scheme.
Yet despite all these schemes and funding, more than one in ten households in England and Wales remain in fuel poverty. Other sources estimate the actual figures are double the government estimate. UK homes are famously cold and leaky; they haemorrhage the warmth we put in them the fastest in Western Europe, or three times as quickly as an average German home.
14 years of funding cuts, policy flops, and increasingly complex conditions around delivery, have resulted in fewer and fewer households receiving support, even as the government spends more and more money.
How a Warm Homes Agency can deliver Labour’s Warm Homes Plan
This is where a Warm Homes Agency comes in. We believe the agency is essential to deliver Labour’s Warm Homes Plan, given the challenges of the last 14 years.
The Warm Homes Plan aims to improve 5 million homes this parliament. Under this Plan, funding to lift low-income families out of fuel poverty will be increased; redesign of council and social housing insulation grants will build more local capacity and devolve more decisions. By 2030, it will be illegal for landlords to let damp, leaky, cold and dangerous rented homes.
A Warm Homes Agency can provide the consistency, stability and expertise that is needed to deliver the Warm Homes Plan. It could recruit experienced executives to lead and work in the Agency, bringing with them a close understanding of how the housing industry works. And as a non-departmental body, it would be able to develop closer and more productive relationships with the private sector, whose trust is running low after a litany of failed housebuilding policies.
Historically, homes policy has been siloed in several departments, meaning that no single entity is thinking about energy efficiency, safety, climate resilience and housing standards in a connected way. Introducing a Warm Homes Agency could be the successful vehicle to help government to design a more coherent and holistic approach, delivered beyond a single parliamentary term. Combining funding streams for energy, climate resilience and home safety would mean investment is targeted at improving the entire home, rather than relying on siloed pots to fund individual pieces of work.
Unlike other investments in nationally significant infrastructure, capital funding for homes is tied to multiple government departments, delivered using a hodge podge of existing funding pots. Over the past decade, this approach has led to enormously inconsistent outcomes, depending on the local authority applying for funding and the particular time the funding is requested. This is not a sustainable or effective way to deliver a multi-billion pound programme of investment, and housing is simply too important to be nationally managed in this way.
A Warm Homes Agency would give home insulation the attention it needs and deserves, ensuring that the money the government spends actually leads to warmer homes, improving quality of life for people living in Britain today, and in the future.
