The Warm Homes Plan will be the UK government’s major new strategy to upgrade Britain’s homes. It’s due to be published very soon and will set out how ministers plan to deliver warmer, cheaper-to-run homes by rolling out low-carbon heating, insulation and other technologies such as batteries and solar panels at scale. According to the government, the plan will deliver the manifesto promise to upgrade five million homes over this Parliament and permanently lift more than a million households out of fuel poverty.

We’ve been anticipating this plan for months at Nesta. It will have huge implications for our mission to substantially reduce carbon emissions from homes. While we don’t yet know the full details, we have a good sense of what to expect - and what will really matter for delivery.

Our colleague Andrew Sissons previously set out seven policy tests for the plan to be successful. In this blog, we dig into the policy detail, to help readers make sense of the plan when it lands.

Here are the six critical areas to watch.

One of the biggest unknowns right now is how the government plans to support low-income households once the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme ends in March 2026. We heard in the Budget in November that this long-running and much-criticised programme which funds home upgrades for low-income households, will be scrapped, along with the levy on bills which supported it. So we know that any replacement will be funded through general taxation; what we still don’t know is how big the replacement scheme will be, or how it will work in practice.

What we will be looking for: we’re not expecting all the answers immediately. But we will be looking for clear signals that the government’s ambition for the new scheme will be commensurate with the scale of the challenge - given that an estimated 6 to 8 million households are living in fuel poverty - without repeating the problems that beset ECO. We’ve set out some suggestions in this recent blog.

The biggest risk is a policy cliff-edge, where the old scheme shuts down before the new one is ready to go. That would leave millions of low-income households, the local supply chains and installers’ jobs in limbo. We want to see a clear commitment to testing and learning on the new delivery model - for example, through trials in different parts of the country - so the government can quickly understand what enables fast, high-quality and cost-effective delivery at scale.

If the Warm Homes Plan is going to work, industry needs clear, binding targets to prepare effectively.

What we will be looking for: exactly how many homes the government aims to upgrade each year, and through which mechanisms. We also want these targets to be broken down by technology, not just one big number that hides the details. And we will be watching closely to see if the plan confirms the timeline for enforcing minimum energy efficiency standards (MEES) of EPC C in the private and social rented sectors by 2030. Crucially, we’ll be checking to see how targets align with the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations in the Seventh Carbon Budget, with a 2030 target of 720,000 annual installations.

No matter how good the national plan looks on paper, it will only work if it has the right delivery arrangements. Local authorities are often best placed to identify households which could benefit most from the support while building trust within communities. They are key partners for the types of street-by-street approaches to retrofits that we need in order to increase the pace and scale of the heat transition.

What we will be looking for: whether the plan sets out meaningful local delivery partnerships that go beyond short-term competitive bidding for resources from central government. We want to see local authorities getting long-term, predictable funding - not another round of short funding pots that make it impossible to plan or build internal capability. We’ll also be looking for clarity on how the plan will improve local heat planning, and link it to other work, such as NESO's strategic spatial energy plan (SSEP), or the forthcoming regional energy system plans (RESPs).

The UK currently has one of the highest electricity-to-gas price ratios in Europe, often hovering around 4:1, meaning electricity is four times more expensive than gas. This is largely because policy costs (social and green levies) have historically been loaded onto electricity bills. This acts as a major financial disincentive for households trying to switch to cleaner electric heating such as heat pumps.

What we will be looking for: we will be looking for a commitment to a clear target ratio, ideally of 2.5, though 3.3 would be a substantive improvement and will ensure that any low-income household switching from a gas boiler to a heat pump will see no price increase in their bills. While the last Budget moved some levies into general taxation, we need the Warm Homes Plan to commit to further structural rebalancing. Without this, even with generous capital grants and new finance models, heat pumps may remain more expensive to run than gas boilers for many households, undermining the plan's decarbonisation goals.

Public grants are essential for low-income households, but they cannot fund the retrofit of all 29 million UK homes. There is a massive affordability challenge for the able-to-pay market - with millions of middle-income households who don't qualify for support but cannot afford the upfront costs of a heat pump.

What we will be looking for: we will be looking for details on how the government plans to unlock private finance. Specifically, does the plan propose government-backed low-interest loans? Equally important is the impact on the average consumer's experience, including whether the plan includes stronger consumer protection standards. We need to ensure that every family investing in their home is protected from poor workmanship and guaranteed the energy savings they were promised.

The Warm Homes Plan will only succeed if there are enough skilled workers to deliver it. Retrofitting millions of homes and installing hundreds of thousands of heat pumps every year will require a workforce transformation on a scale the heating sector has never seen before. Today, the UK faces serious shortages of qualified installers across insulation, heat pumps, ventilation and wider retrofit coordination.

What we will be looking for: following the publication of the Clean Energy Jobs Plan in October, we’re looking for further detail on how the UK government plans to support training and boost the heating workforce. This should be at a scale in alignment with the Climate Change Committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget recommended target for 40,200 active heat pump installers by 2030. Critically, we want to see long-term certainty for training providers, colleges and employers, not short-term schemes that appear and disappear with each funding round.

The Warm Homes Plan has the potential to transform millions of lives - cutting energy bills, improving health and putting the UK firmly on track to decarbonise its homes. But ambition alone will not be enough. Success will depend on whether the plan gets the hard delivery issues right: how schemes are designed and funded; how local delivery is enabled; how households are supported to act; how electricity and gas prices are rebalanced; and whether the workforce is in place to deliver at scale.

When the plan is published, these are the questions we will be asking. Over the months ahead, we will continue to work with government, local authorities and industry to help turn ambition into action - and to make sure the Warm Homes Plan delivers for households and tackles decarbonisation.