Burning oil and gas to heat the UK’s buildings, and homes in particular, is the second largest source of carbon emissions after surface transport. Over the next decade, the UK Government needs to pave the way to a future where clean, affordable and highly efficient low-carbon heating is the norm.

This will not be easy – the heat transition is a mission that will define much of the Government’s work on climate change. We need to increase the number of heat pumps being installed by more than tenfold in the coming years, invest in heat networks and electricity grids, support households and workers, and insulate more and more homes.

This project represents the culmination of years of work on low-carbon heating by the sustainable future mission at Nesta. The overarching problem is that the UK has stopped making meaningful progress towards reducing emissions from homes. As a result, it has also stopped making progress on reducing fuel poverty. 

We published the plan following the 2024 general election as part of an aggressive push into the policy space. Nesta has solutions that other policy organisations cannot develop, and we want to make the most of this opportunity to share our expertise. Our aims here are to:

• directly influence how the Government thinks about the issue of heat
• provide new models for policy and evidence that help to resolve long-standing issues, such as the affordability of low-carbon heat
• provoke a wider debate about what is possible to make progress, drawing in both the policy community and people working to practically deliver the heat transition
• further raise Nesta’s profile as a leading thinker in this space.

This project draws on a wide range of Nesta’s previous work including proposals on:

• how a coordinated 'street-by-street' approach to delivery could accelerate progress while delivering lower-costs and other benefits to communities.
• how subsidies and loans can help simplify choices households make about changing a heating system or upgrading the efficiency of their home.
• how storytelling and smart messaging can help people understand the nature of the heat transition and their place in it.
• how to use reform as a tool to make Government, and the work that it does, more coherent, transforming our approaches to retail energy, local planning, and finance to get all the different parts of the system pulling in the same direction.