CIAT welcomes full details of the Warm Homes Plan
This week saw the publication of the Government’s much-delayed Warm Homes Plan. Following a period of uncertainty, CIAT is pleased to see that the plan represents a meaningful step forward in how the UK delivers domestic retrofit activities, with much of the Plan aligned to CIAT’s recent policy paper, Beyond the Warm Homes Plan: A National Retrofit Programme for People and Planet.
A detailed summary of the Plan will be shared with members and affiliates in due course. The full Plan can be read here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/warm-homes-plan
Welcoming to the Plan, Usman Yaqub PCIAT, President, said:
A safe, healthy home is an essential foundation for a good life. But as the Warm Homes Plan acknowledges, UK homes are disproportionately cold and damp, fuelling the cost-of-living crisis and contributing to ill health, climate change and air pollution. In this context, the Warm Homes Plan, with its flexible approach and substantial financial underpinning, delivers on many of CIAT’s priorities.
Tried and tested measures, such as insulation, rooftop solar panels and heat-pumps, will deliver rapid benefits, while innovative technologies, from heat batteries to local heat networks linked to new data centres, will put the UK at the cutting edge of the energy transition.
CIAT particularly welcomes efforts to rationalise the UK’s complex, fragmented home upgrades landscape, by establishing the Warm Homes Agency as a single point of access, merging programmes over time, and providing a universal offer, so that no household is excluded from support.
Of course, there is always more to do. While resilience measures such as external shading are mentioned, the Plan fails to recognise the value of holistic design-led upgrades, as outlined in CIAT’s recent report ‘Beyond the Warm Homes Plan: A National Retrofit Programme for People and Planet’. And while the Plan alludes to the Future Homes Standard and whole-life carbon assessment, it does not advance either of these prioritise, meaning that, for the time being, UK homes will continue to be built to outdated standards.
But overall, Warm Homes Plan represents a step change in how we tackle the UK’s crisis of poor housing. And that’s something to celebrate.
