In partnership with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), this project gathered evidence on whether an area-based approach could make home decarbonisation more attractive and what criteria would most appeal to households.

We have created a blueprint that sets out how a coordinated approach might work, based on workshops held in England, Wales and Scotland. Using insights and stakeholder feedback, we have identified the steps a coordinated approach to low-carbon heating might entail.

This experiment helped us understand whether such an approach holds promise to be rolled out to households across the UK.

BIT’s Predictiv testing tool presents participants with a number of scenarios to choose from, and can also unlock information about their preferences and choices. By partnering with BIT, we were able to gather real-life insights about the impact a coordinated approach to low-carbon heating might have on achieving our objective to decarbonise the UK housing stock.

This project helped us to understand how households might respond to an area-based approach to low-carbon heating, and helped bring the principles that underpin coordinated switching in contact with reality. Do households feel there is a need for this coordinated approach? Would they adopt it? Using an online experiment helped to bring early answers to those questions and inform future work.

Our aim is to decarbonise 30% of the UK’s housing fabric by 2030. To do this, the number of households equipped with low-carbon heating technology, such as heat pumps, needs to increase drastically. Currently, however, households are expected to switch from a boiler to a different system on an individual basis. They must then navigate a complex customer journey, and often pay a high cost to acquire a heat pump, but also to modernise their homes’ heating system. In a number of cities and towns across the UK, residents are also faced with additional barriers, such as accessing finance and planning, which can hinder or discourage them from adopting a low-carbon heating system.

With this test, we are hoping to establish proof of concept for a coordinated approach to switching to low-carbon heating, understanding whether it might be an attractive solution to residents provided it offers enough incentives. Working in partnership with BIT, we garnered real-life insights about households’ needs and preferences to pave the way for an area-based approach.

We asked a sample of 5,525 UK home owner-occupiers whether they would opt for a low-carbon heating technology to heat their home. Participants were first shown information about low-carbon heating. All were given the opportunity to choose between replacing their boiler with the same technology, or opt for a low-carbon heating system.

Given that participants’ situations and needs would be very different, the experiment did not specify whether the low-carbon heating technology would be an air source or ground source heat pump.

The participants were split into five groups: in the control group, the pathway to adopting a low-carbon heating system was based on the current individual route. All treatment arms were shown different versions of clean heat neighbourhoods. All included a baseline version of a coordinated approach, including customer service and vetted suppliers, and three supplemented this with different financial incentives.

We know that price currently slows down heat pump adoption. To anchor our experiment in real-life experiences of heat pump adoption, while also clearly isolating the impact of coordinating the heat transition on households, all participants were asked to choose between a boiler and a clean heat system twice. The first time, they were asked to assume that both technologies cost the same (cost parity iteration). The second time, they were shown a generalised price for boilers and for the low-carbon heating system, where the boiler was cheaper (£3,000 vs £5,000).

This experiment delivered insights about the impact of price on the adoption of low-carbon heating, but also provided information as to what factors would improve or negatively impact the success of an area-based low-carbon heating scheme.