Beyond the Warm Homes Plan
In November, the Labour Government formally announced its Warm Homes Plan. Underpinned by £13.2 billion of government funding, the Warm Homes Plan will have a profound impact on the UK's housing, and the built environment sector more broadly, giving businesses the confidence to invest in the green skills we urgently need as we transition to a low carbon economy.
As the leading global membership qualifying body for Architectural Technology, the Chartered Institute of Architectural Technologists (CIAT) is passionate about ensuring everyone has the foundation for life provided by a healthy, high-quality home. Nobody should face fuel bills so high that they have to choose between heating and eating, so it's welcome to see a government committed to delivering warm homes with lower energy needs and reduced winter fuel bills.
But by focusing on warmth and heating costs in isolation, the Warm Homes Plan risks storing up problems for the future.
In 2024, for the first time ever, average global temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial baseline. An optimistic view of current global commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions puts us on course for 2.6 degrees of warming within a century. In other words, a warmer world, with more extreme weather, is now baked in. Our built environment needs to rapidly adjust to this reality.
In practical terms, that means we need homes which contribute to both climate change mitigation (through lower emissions) and crucially, climate adaptation, with improved ventilation and passive or active cooling measures to ensure homes stay cool through heatwaves. Ventilation must also go hand-in-hand with insulation improvements, if we do not want homes plagued with damp and potential structural defects.
Then there are issues like greenhouse gas emissions air pollution, including from gas cookers and boilers, surface water flood risks which are exacerbated by the design of our urban fabric, and noise and light pollution which disrupt healthy sleep cycles.
The implications of these housing issues are profound. Unhealthy housing has been estimated to cost the NHS as much as £2.5 billion per year. The broader social and economic costs of poor housing (such as lower productivity and poor educational outcomes) may be far greater.
The solution to all this is clear. Rather than focusing on just the "low hanging fruit" of warm homes, we need a bold, holistic approach which ensures that our homes can cope with extremes of cold and heat, flash floods and droughts. Homes which are safe, user-friendly and easily maintained. Homes which utilise sustainable, healthy materials. In short, homes that are fit for the future.
And because every home is unique in its context, design, materials, construction and usage patterns, a simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach will fall short. A Georgian terrace in a coastal town will need different interventions to a 1950s social housing block, or a detached house completed in the 2000s.
Ultimately, the only way to achieve these outcomes is with design-led home upgrades, drawing on the expertise and experience of professionals such as Chartered Architectural Technologists.
CIAT's new report, Beyond the Warm Homes Plan, lays out a vision to deliver this, moving from the current patchwork of short term, hard-to-access, funding programmes, to a holistic, long-term programme which enables broad based access to design-led retrofits for all households, regardless of tenure.
We propose a model which combines grants and low-interest loans, so that the high up-front costs of home upgrades do not act as a barrier for households.
We argue that a long-term commitment from government, backed up by the creation of a dedicated unit to deliver the National Retrofit Programme with clear ministerial accountability, is vital to ensure to give confidence to the market and drive skills improvement.
We call for financial incentives, including the removal of VAT on retrofit measures, and a reduction in stamp duty for the best performing homes, to ensure that investing in housing quality is worthwhile for households.
And we advocate for post-occupancy evaluation and the provision of "home instruction manuals", so that everyone can make the most of a high-quality home.
This approach will deliver homes which are comfortable and healthy now, and resilient to what might come next.
The Government is right that we need to tackle the problem of cold homes in winter, but every home that is insulated without consideraton of the wider needs of the residents, community and the planet is another home that will need further upgrades in the coming decades.
The UK can ill afford such a missed opportunity.
CIAT’s recent report, Beyond the Warm Homes Plan: A National Retrofit Programme for people and planet, can be found below:
As featured in the Winter issue of ATJ
