About Nesta

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society.

In this project, we adopted a people-centric approach to consider how a government incentive scheme for low-carbon heating in England and Wales might be improved. The goal is to enhance the appeal and increase the uptake of subsidies, enabling more households to embrace decarbonised heating.

Our long-term objective from future phases is to work with policymakers to improve current and future subsidy schemes that increase the number of households benefiting from subsidies and adopting low-carbon heating systems.

This phase of work convened stakeholders from across the industry to build an understanding of the boiler upgrade scheme and previous low-carbon heating grants, working in the open to diagnose issues that may be preventing uptake, and highlighting any missed opportunities to increase applicability. The findings from this phase of work have been framed as a series of problem statements.

The project has stopped short of diving into in-depth recommendations for improvements to the scheme. Its aim is to highlight the problems and barriers that may be reducing the uptake of low-carbon heat subsidies, while outlining potential opportunities for further work to build towards potential new subsidy structures.

This report is part of our policy library for decarbonising home heating

Explore the library to learn more

Authors

Andy Marsden

Andy Marsden

Andy Marsden

Design Lead, Design & Technology

He/Him

Andy is the design lead for the sustainable future mission.

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Max Woollard

Max Woollard

Max Woollard

Analyst, sustainable future mission

Max joins Nesta as an analyst in the sustainable future mission.

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Kevin Wiley

Kevin Wiley

Kevin Wiley

Analyst, sustainable future mission

Kevin is an analyst for the sustainable future mission.

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