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 next 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.

Nesta’s policy plan for heat will be a comprehensive guide to the heat transition. It will outline the key issues and choices that the next Government will face – providing all the advice that a minister would need to grapple with this challenge. 

We will produce a comprehensive plan that will help the next Secretary of State for climate change understand the challenge of the heat transition and what they can do to solve it.

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 are publishing this report in an election year 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 the how the next Government thinks about the issue of heat
• provide new models for policy and evidence that helps to resolve long-standing issues, such as the affordability of low-carbon heat
• provoke a wider debate about what is possible to make progress. This will draw 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.

We are drafting a policy plan for heat which will look at the heat transition in six different ways:

• What are the strategic choices that the Government can take early on that will restart the UK’s progress on heat decarbonisation?
• How can policy help to address the costs of upgrading our homes?
• What needs to be done to accelerate and manage the phase-down and eventual phase-out of fossil heat?
• How can the Government deliver upgrades in 25 million homes in 25 years?
• What more can be done to support households through this transition?
• How should the Government support the workers and businesses who are essential to make this happen?

This project draws on a wide range of Nesta’s work to answer these questions and present credible, ambitious options for the Government to make real progress:

• 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.

We will publish the policy plan for heat in July 2024.