The Warm Homes Plan sets out the ambition to upgrade millions of home heating systems across the UK – with a greater focus on local, more coordinated delivery of upgrades.

Currently, most home heating is upgraded on a house-by-house basis. This greater focus on coordinated delivery of upgrades means facilitating the transition of multiple households within a specific geographic area - be it a street, neighbourhood, or larger region - to low-carbon heating systems.

The announced shift towards area-based delivery has been welcomed by many in the industry as it has the potential to simplify a complex landscape of organisations and subsidies. But it leaves the question of 'how'?

An area-based delivery model requires a change in roles, responsibilities and incentives for a wide range of stakeholders. Success will depend on different types of government support and resources uniting around shared outcomes.

The UK government also announced it will establish a Warm Homes Agency, a new public body that will help local areas to deliver home upgrades and provide advice and guidance to households. To do this effectively, the Warm Homes Agency should focus on a test, learn, and grow approach to developing capacity, sharing resources, and ensuring that the plan delivers for households, businesses, and local government.

But what does test, learn, and grow mean in this context? What should the Warm Homes Agency do?

The Warm Homes Agency should develop lasting partnerships in a small number of places that reflect the different contexts across the UK, working with areas that share the ambition, but may not necessarily have the resource, to move area-based delivery into reality. Initially, these partnerships should be focused on learning, but the Warm Homes Agency should have the ambition to help every local authority.

This should involve learning from the big combined authorities, focusing on how central government could help to push existing work towards delivery at a much larger scale. For example, this could include moving beyond pilots to supporting public-private partnerships exploring communal solutions - such as net zero terraced streets.

In addition to working with well-resourced combined authorities, the Warm Homes Agency should also develop partnerships with other areas that may not yet have explored area-based delivery. Partnerships should learn through doing, providing resources and expertise to local areas to understand what area-based delivery looks like and how a national agency can support.

The Warm Homes Agency should play a central role in scaling clean heat planning. Building on our partnership with Plymouth City Council, an example of learning alongside a local authority, the Agency could support the wider clean heat planning rollout to more local authorities. This would enable further testing of the process, continuing to build confidence in its value, and help local authorities move from strategic planning into delivery.

Through place-based partnerships that involve collaborative testing and the expansion of existing pilots, the Warm Homes Agency should learn from barriers that are uncovered. All the warm homes delivery mechanisms the UK government have at their disposal should then be considered relevant subjects for these learnings. For example, experiences from working on the ground to deliver schemes should be as influential to the design of subsidies as they are to understanding the role of local government and the resources they require. This requires going into these tests with open minds to the wider learnings that will enable area-based delivery. Ultimately, the UK government must avoid setting fixed outputs – such as to develop a clean heat plan – and remain open and flexible to whatever learnings come from project scaling.

There’s also a lot of great work already underway around the UK to learn from. The Warm Homes Agency should collaborate with partners to capture what is working, understand the replicability, and develop the tools and guidance for all areas to benefit.

This could mean understanding best practice in household information, much like we see in Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), highlighting existing delivery models – such as those being trialled by iChoosr and Thermly in different areas of England. Or understanding how the private and public sector are collaborating in areas such as Midlothian and Bristol.

It should focus on what works, where and why, enabling areas to benefit from approaches most suited to their unique contexts – a rural area faces very different decarbonisation challenges to a major urban centre. The Warm Homes Agency should hold the reins on making sure more progressed areas can share their work for others to benefit from. And the agency should step in to create scalable guidance, tools and processes when the capacity at the local level may not allow.

The Warm Homes Agency must ensure it’s as easy as possible for local authorities to benefit from this process. Resources should be provided based on the outcomes of test areas and the learning about what is currently working. Guides should be created to help rapidly build capacity at a local level and, wherever possible, processes and tasks automated through data, tools, and reduced processes. For example, we recently published our clean heat playbook to support local government and their partners plan, coordinate and deliver area-based low-carbon heating.

Providing resource is one element to growing. Ensuring that local areas can do the work that needs to be done – with as little friction as possible – is the other. Reducing the duplication of work and the learning curve for areas. This could look to build on the work of the heat network delivery unit, already providing open-source resources, tools and guidance to areas, expanding on this to offer the same across a suite of low-carbon technologies and approaches.

Where the UK government already has the capability and resources, for example in delivering heat network zoning and local low-income schemes, test, learn and grow should be seen as a vehicle to enable collaboration across these different departments. For example, our work with Plymouth City Council has built an understanding of how clean heat planning could enable cross-tenure delivery of clean heat. The successful delivery of an area's clean heat plan could be made easier through separate departments collaborating and combining. The Warm Homes Agency, built around a culture of test, learn and grow, should be the vehicle for this.

Taking this approach centres the development of how the warm homes agency supports local delivery around the people who will be affected by, or responsible for, the delivery of the warm homes plan. Moving beyond consultation to deep engagement, partnership and towards co-creation.

But doesn’t this take time? Yes. However, by working with areas that are ready to push forward, delivery can start now, building capacity from the start and developing clear examples for others to build on. De-risking a complex area quickly through safe experimentation will generate momentum and accelerate progress towards the ultimate aim of upgrading millions of home heating systems.

Our work on clean heat neighbourhoods leans heavily on this approach - and has started to work with partners across Great Britain initially on the co-development of a proposal for area-based delivery, and now on how to go about delivering.

If you want to read more about the test and learn approach, Nesta and BIT published the test and learn playbook, providing a place to collect examples of this approach and presenting tools for others to use.