By Sam Perry Green Bargaining Officer Yorkshire and Humber TUC

The government’s Warm Homes Plan, promised in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, has the potential to be revolutionary.

An ambitious and well-executed plan to cut carbon emissions from how we heat our homes could tackle up to 18% of the UK’s carbon emissions in a single programme while slashing energy bills and improving the health of literally millions of British people, especially those with precarious finances. Getting this right will also mean a huge expansion of a sector which holds the potential for good, well-paid, long-lasting jobs in every community in the country.

But none of this is guaranteed. So, the TUC is taking engagement with the government on the shape on the Warm Homes Plan very seriously.

At the end of last year, we released our Warm Homes Recommendations paper outlining what we see as the potential for the (as yet not released) Plan and some key recommendations about how the government can maximise its impact. And we’ve continued to engage with central government, local and regional government, and relevant Parliamentary committees to promote these policies.

Key is that the government establishes a Warm Homes Agency. This standing body could keep this focus on action, ensure that home energy efficiency upgrades (‘domestic retrofit’) is a constant feature of industrial strategy for decades to come, build a stable and long-lived economic environment to allow retrofit to flourish, and make sure that efforts across the UK are centred within a single national vision.

We’ve also been clear that the majority of the government’s additional £6.6bn of funding needs to be fed through local authorities, not allocated by central government to favoured regional mayors or larger housing associations only. And, to keep the clear focus on impact, we’ve recommended that funding should be apportioned across local authorities according to relative fuel poverty of their populations. Energy efficiency is at its core a social issue and must be treated as such.

Local authorities should be given primary responsibility for delivery of retrofit measures and for the development of local retrofit delivery strategies which prioritise neighbourhoods according to local need to guide their work. And this feeds into our essential recommendation that energy efficiency upgrades be rolled out on a well-planned, accountable, strictly worst-first basis that recognises the benefits of a neighbourhood level approach.

We’re also clear, learning from many case studies, that in-house delivery—delivery of works by staff on local authority payrolls—should be the default setting for retrofit delivery coordinated by local authorities. Recognising that this is already the preference of many councils (because of the cost savings over the longer term) but that they struggle to make the annual budget financial case at the moment, the government should also introduce a Retrofit Direct Delivery Accelerator, grants for workforce skills development, and in-sourcing loans to smooth the transition. At a minimum, retrofit coordinators (those works coordination professionals with legal accountability over retrofit outcomes) should be directly employed in every local authority to support quality, accountability, and job creation.

Furthermore, and because the social purpose of this work is so important, a principle should be established that retrofit always pays. Much work should be delivered for free. But, where government-backed loans and leveraged private finance are made available to households, this should be done under strict rules which require that repayments can never exceed the real value of the savings to energy bills achieved by the retrofit measures installed.

Too many current jobs in retrofit are poor quality and isolated, resulting in precarity, disempowerment, and unaccountability. All future home upgrade jobs must be high-quality (easily ensured by direct employment) with local authorities being made to comply with strong procurement requirements, all retrofit employers required to adhere to nationally negotiated terms and conditions, and a national training programme being established for new entrants and workers undergoing career-transition.

Finally, the Warm Homes Plan must be more than a collection of short-term policies and funding allocations. The last government introduced various partial home upgrade interventions to ‘stimulate the economy’ which made little material difference to households and created a fragmented, fragile, and undervalued workforce. The new Warm Homes Agency should develop a multi-decade National Retrofit Plan which established unambiguous targets and timelines to upgrade all UK homes to desired energy efficiency standards in line with the Climate Change Committee’s targets. And, as a first step, this National Retrofit Plan should set out an initial 10-year implementation phase to scale up capacity, immediately tackle the very worst cases of poor housing, and create the economic stability (by investing in delivery, supply chains, and skills) that will carry the national mission through for decades to come.

The TUC has welcomed the government’s action on retrofit so far, and especially the government’s realisation that certain private firms have been taking advantage of public money to deliver significantly substandard works. The case for a National Retrofit Plan; the creation of well-trained, public sector, local retrofit workforces; and accountable and strictly worst-first delivery is growing by the day. And, because retrofit is a central labour movement issue—about hundreds of thousands of good, new jobs in every community and about improving the lives of millions of working households across the country—the TUC will continue to fight to get this right, and to win better work and better lives for working people across the country.

This blog was originally headed by a picture of a worker spraying on roof foam insulation. We have changed it because this is a potentially damaging method that can lead to structural problems arising from condensation and mould, as explored here. https://hoa.org.uk/advice/guides-for-homeowners/i-am-improving/spray-foam-roof-insulation/